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chimcess · 1 month ago

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⮞ Chapter Six: Bureaucratic Felchers 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: 19.7k+ 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: This is longer than I thought it would be so I again have had to split this up differently than I would have liked.

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The days stopped having names.

There was just light and dark. Heat and cold. Movement and collapse.

She couldn’t say how long she’d been at it anymore. Time had collapsed into a series of repeated motions: unbolt, strip, replace, curse, repeat. Her internal clock was a blur of ration schedules and brief rest cycles that ended the moment she couldn’t pretend she was resting anymore.

The lander sat under the stretched-out canopy of solar blankets just outside the Hab’s eastern workspace, its scarred hull looming like a carcass she refused to bury. She’d stripped most of the exterior shell by now—sections so brittle they crumbled under the pressure of her gloves. Panels that looked intact from a distance splintered at the hinges or peeled away in sheets when she applied force.

Half the external structure was junk.

But the core housing—the pressure-stabilized assembly at the heart of the machine—was still sealed. Scratched. Warped. But sealed. The insulation foam was cooked, the seals half-melted, but the containment structure had held.

The battery, predictably, was dead, but it hadn’t ruptured. That alone felt like a gift from a higher power she didn’t believe in anymore.

She tried to pace herself in the beginning—take breaks, drink, sleep—but it didn’t last. The work demanded more. More time. More energy. More than she had.

Soon, she was working fifteen, sixteen hours at a stretch, broken only by the occasional alarm from her hydration monitor or the sharp stab of a leg cramp that forced her to stretch out flat on the floor, panting, until the pain passed.

Her hands were a mess. Even with gloves, the skin along the inside of her fingers had blistered, popped, and blistered again. She wore gauze wraps now, layered under the gloves, but they slipped, soaked through, left raw pink skin that smarted with every movement. Her forearms screamed at her with every turn of the wrench. Her shoulders throbbed deep into the joints from crouching over a bench not meant for this kind of work.

But she didn’t stop.

The Hab’s main workbench—once a place for routine diagnostics and simple component testing—was now a battlefield of salvaged parts and half-functioning assemblies. Old comms tubing lay in spirals on the floor, cut and re-routed to serve as makeshift wiring conduits. She’d gutted two of the rover’s secondary sensor pods to cannibalize their processors, then re-soldered their cores into the lander’s stripped data line.

One night—she thought it was night, though who could tell anymore—she stood in silence for ten full minutes before connecting a final junction. Not for drama. Just because her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

She was building life from rot. Trying to breathe warmth back into metal that had been dead for longer than some missions lasted.

She rigged an environmental heater into a low-output power conversion unit—something designed to condense drinking water, now barely stable enough to funnel current into the backup loop. It buzzed when she powered it up. Not reassuringly.

But it worked. Sort of.

Everything she touched was either overheating or underperforming. The voltage swings made her flinch every time she touched a wire. The diagnostics gave inconsistent reads—some sensors simply refused to admit the last two decades had happened. One system thought it was still docked in low orbit. Another insisted it was 2089.

One night, while rerouting the primary regulator through a bent coupling she’d hammered back into shape with a rock—because her mallet had cracked two days earlier—she felt her entire upper back seize. Just locked. The kind of pain that makes you stop breathing for a second. She sat on the floor for nearly an hour after that, her head resting against the hull, every part of her damp with sweat. She watched the condensation from her breath disappear into the dust as she muttered curses no one could hear.

But then she got up. Because that was what there was to do.

And finally, one night—if it was night—she reached for the last module. The connector clicked. A sharp, metallic snap. The system locked.

She sat back slowly, the stool wobbling under her weight. Her arms were trembling from the strain. Her fingers refused to uncurl. She looked down at her hands like they belonged to someone else. Her body felt hollowed out—like someone had rung her out and left her in the sun.

Her eyes drifted up to the camera perched near the edge of the bench. A little red light blinked, patient and steady. She’d forgotten it was still on. She hadn’t shut it off in days.

She cleared her throat, the sound raw and dusty.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice barely registered. “Step one’s done.”

She reached forward and wiped the dust off the control panel with the sleeve of her undershirt. The motion left a streak across the display. Her fingers hesitated, hovering over the first set of toggles.

She knew them. She’d studied them before any of this had gone wrong. Before this place had become a graveyard with no headstones. They felt familiar. Like muscle memory.

She sat there for a long time with her fingers hovering over the switch, her hands trembling too much to move.

There were a dozen things that could go wrong. A surge, a short, a silent software fault buried so deep in the system it wouldn’t even show until after she burned the last of her power trying to coax a response. The casing had hairline fractures she’d sealed with melted patch resin. One of the relay boards still gave off a faint electrical smell when it ran for too long. And the capacitor network? Frankenstein’d from three incompatible systems and sheer spite.

But it was the only shot she had.

She wiped a shaking hand across her mouth, glanced at the camera she’d left running in the corner—more habit than hope—and leaned forward. Her breath fogged the scratched polyglass screen as she whispered, almost like she was afraid saying it too loud might scare the whole thing off:

“Let’s see if this thing still remembers how to breathe.”

She flipped the first switch. Nothing. Silence.

It wasn’t just absence—it was active. Thick. Like the air had turned solid and her lungs forgot how to work. A moment passed. Another.

One diode blinked red, then green. Then came the low, uneven hum of power crawling its way through dry circuits. Something deep inside the lander gave a metallic clunk, like a lung trying to remember how to inhale after drowning.

Her eyes snapped to the screen. A strip of green. Then amber. Then more green.

The diagnostic panel lit up, stuttering to life like a drunk trying to stand. The screen flared—too bright, too sudden—then stabilized. Sections of the UI began to populate. Slowly. Glitchy. But real. She watched it happen in stunned silence, afraid to move. Afraid it might blink out and take her with it.

The environmental system chirped once. A faint, bird-like blip. Then it quieted.

The internal clock blinked 12:00:00.00 and began counting.

Wrong, of course. Meaningless. It was counting again. The status light went solid green.

She sat back, just a few inches at first. Her hands still hovered in the air. Like she’d been holding her breath for the entire time she’d been on this godforsaken planet and had only now remembered how to exhale.

A sound escaped her lips—small, unshaped. A hitch. Then another. She covered her mouth, but it didn’t stop.

The sob tore out of her like it had been waiting at the base of her spine for months.

She stumbled back from the bench, tripping over a coil of tubing, and hit the floor hard. The impact knocked the breath out of her, but it didn’t matter. She was laughing now, too, in jagged bursts between sobs. Both sounds came out at once—raw, involuntary, almost animal.

She curled forward, arms around her knees, forehead pressed to the cold floor of the Hab.

It was too much. Too much relief. Too much hope all at once. It hit like a fist to the chest.

For weeks—maybe longer—she’d existed in a kind of suspended animation. Endless work. Endless day. The suns never set here, not really. Time had stopped meaning anything. She slept when her body shut down. Ate when her hands couldn’t hold a tool anymore. The number in the corner of the camera feed was her only guess at how many days had passed, but even that was unreliable. Glitchy. Maybe corrupted.

And through it all, nothing. No voices. No signals. No contact. Until now.

She forced herself to look up. Her vision swam. She blinked fast, dragging herself upright.

On the screen, the lander’s systems were still initializing. The comms package wasn’t fully online, but the routing table was back. She could see the interface. The channel protocols. The handshake logic waiting for input.

If she could get power stabilized and reroute signal through the rover’s external antenna…

She swallowed, chest tight.

She might be able to send a message. A real one. With data. With coordinates. With proof of life.

She stood too fast. Her knees buckled and she caught herself on the workbench. Her head was pounding. She hadn’t had water in too long. Her body was still locked in the ache of survival mode.

But none of it mattered.

She stared at the word PROMETHEUS etched into the side panel, half-obscured by grime, and grinned through a throat gone raw.

“I knew you weren’t done,” she whispered, touching the metal with shaking fingers.

Then, louder—laughing now, breathless and cracked:

“You stubborn son of a bitch.”

She hit the internal comms switch. A familiar interface blinked to life. Crude. Prehistoric by Earth standards. But she could see the relay bounce path. If she timed it right, caught the orbiting NOSA satellite within window…

She could go home.

It would still take time. There were diagnostics to run. System calibrations. She’d need to stabilize the internal temperature and clean out every speck of contamination from the RTG lines.

But for the first time in—God, how long had it been?

She had proof she wasn’t dead. That she wasn’t forgotten. That she could be found.

The Hab was still dim, the world outside still blasted red, and her body still ached in a hundred places.

But now, sitting beside a resurrected lander and a flickering comms panel that was almost awake again, she felt something she hadn’t felt in what might have been months.

Hope didn’t come in a flood. It came like the first breath after almost drowning.

And she was breathing again.

The garage at JPL was quiet in that loaded, unnatural way only rooms full of engineers can be—filled with the subtle clatter of keyboards, the hum of cooling fans, and the sound of too many people trying not to hold their breath too loudly.

It was nearly 3 a.m. in Pasadena, but no one had left. Not really. Some had wandered down the hall for coffee or stared blankly at the vending machine long enough to forget what they were doing, but they always returned. They always found themselves pulled back into this echoing concrete-walled space, drawn to the bank of monitors like moths circling a stubborn lightbulb.

Then the console screen on Station 4 flickered.

A few lines of garbled static, then clarity. Simple, unmistakable.

PROMETHEUS LOG: SOL 0 — BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED

TIME: 00:00:00

LOADING OS…

PERFORMING HARDWARE CHECK...

No one spoke. Chairs creaked quietly as people leaned forward. Someone dropped a pen, but no one looked.

The glow from the monitor bathed the surrounding metal worktables and diagnostic gear in pale light. The tension in the room thickened with each new line.

INT TEMPERATURE: -34C

EXT TEMPERATURE: NONFUNCTIONAL

BATTERY: FULL

HIGAIN: OKAY

LOGAIN: OKAY

METEOROLOGY: NONFUNCTIONAL

SOLAR A: NONFUNCTIONAL

SOLAR B: NONFUNCTIONAL SOLAR C: NONFUNCTIONAL

HARDWARE CHECK COMPLETE.

A few people exchanged glances. Those weren’t great numbers. But they were numbers.

Then came the line everyone had been waiting for:

BROADCASTING STATUS. LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL...

And then—

LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL…

LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL...

Each repetition landed heavier than the last. The silence that followed was mechanical, deliberate. Just long enough to doubt. Just long enough to feel the air leave the room.

Marco crossed his arms tighter across his chest. He hadn’t blinked since the first line. Next to him, Mateo leaned forward, elbows on the console, lips parted like he might whisper something to the machine, like it would help.

Then the screen updated:

SIGNAL ACQUIRED.

No one moved. It took a second to register. Maybe two. As if their brains had to run a boot sequence of their own to process it.

Then the room erupted.

It wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t choreographed. It was messy and real and loud. People laughed, clapped, slapped backs, some shouting half-formed thoughts, some just standing there in stunned relief. One of the interns let out a string of expletives so enthusiastic that the older woman next to him laughed until she nearly fell over.

Mateo didn’t cheer.

Not at first.

He stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. The simple phrase just sitting there, plain and quiet in its plain white font: SIGNAL ACQUIRED.

Someone was alive out there.

He ran a hand down his face, the disbelief finally cracking into something softer. He exhaled and turned to Marco, who looked as if he hadn’t breathed at all until that moment.

“She did it,” Mateo said, voice low, dazed.

Marco just nodded, eyes still locked on the screen. His throat worked like he was trying to speak, but nothing came out. He was smiling. Barely. The kind of smile you get when something too impossible to hope for actually happens.

Across the room, the operations lead was already on comms, yelling over the cheers, coordinating signal lock. People were moving now—rushing to bring other systems online, pulling up bandwidth allocations, cross-checking satellite relays. The energy in the room had flipped. The air had a pulse now.

This wasn’t just a blip. This wasn’t telemetry from some dead rover buried in sand. This was a lander that hadn’t spoken in years.

This was Prometheus.

And it was talking.

Mateo sat down slowly, hands resting on the console, staring at the screen like it might vanish if he blinked. His voice, when he spoke again, was quieter than before—almost reverent.

“Holy shit.”

The sky above M6-117 never changed much—just an endless dome of pale, bleached orange that never gave way to stars. The suns didn’t set. They just circled and layered over each other, always hanging there, always burning.

Y/N stood outside the Hab, boots planted in powdery, red soil. Her hands were smeared with grease, fingertips raw under torn gloves. She tilted her head back, squinting up at the Prometheus lander, half-buried in its thermal shroud. Its high-gain antenna, silent for years, was moving.

Slowly. Stiffly. But moving.

The dish creaked on its axis as it shifted, metal joints grumbling under the strain of age and heat. The movement was uneven at first—hesitant, mechanical—but it found its target, angling toward the far western edge of the horizon.

Toward Aguerra.

Or a satellite. Or a station. Someone. Something that could answer.

She didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.

Then the motor gave a final click, and the dish held steady. Pointed. Alive.

Her heart stuttered once—an involuntary jolt, as if her body had only just gotten the message.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, the words breaking out of her without permission.

She blinked, staggered back a step, her hands hovering in the air like she couldn’t decide whether to cover her mouth or punch the sky.

“Oh my god!” she said again, louder this time, her voice cracking under the strain of adrenaline and disbelief. It came out half a laugh, half a sob.

Then something inside her just—broke loose.

She laughed. Loud and sharp, the sound echoing across the empty flats like it didn’t know how to stop. And before she could think about how absurd it might look, she started to move—spinning in place, arms out wide like a child in a summer storm.

She danced.

Not gracefully. Not even rhythmically. Just a wild, joyful release of motion—half stumbling, half hopping in circles as she kicked up clouds of red dust. Her boots slipped in the soft grit, sending her lurching sideways, but she didn’t care. She threw her arms in the air, let her head fall back, and howled something wordless at the bright sky.

She was grinning so hard it hurt.

The antenna was tracking. The diagnostics were holding steady. The telemetry stack had confirmed the signal pathway was stable. For the first time in—God, weeks, maybe months—she wasn’t guessing.

Someone was listening.

She didn’t know who yet. Didn’t know if it was NOSA, or a deep-space array, or some flyby relay picking up the call. But it didn’t matter.

She wasn’t just broadcasting into silence anymore.

There was a path.

A voice could travel it.

Her voice.

She staggered to a stop, out of breath, chest heaving with the effort of movement and the sheer weight of emotion she hadn’t let herself feel in so long. Her face was damp, though she couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears. Probably both. Her legs were shaking. She didn’t care.

She wiped her sleeve across her face, dragging grit across her cheekbone, and looked up again.

The dish hadn’t moved.

Back at JPL, the mood in the control room had shifted from stunned disbelief to a kind of focused, collective obsession. Engineers were packed shoulder to shoulder, eyes fixed on the wall of displays like spectators watching a patient’s vitals stabilize for the first time after a coma. The tension wasn’t gone—it had simply refined into something sharp and surgical.

And at the center of it all was Doug Russell’s station.

Monitors cast a sterile glow across his desk and the two chairs flanking it—though no one was sitting. Tim, JPL’s most tenacious and sarcastic comms tech, hunched forward as he typed, the clack of keys rapid and precise. His wiry frame leaned into the console like the machine might move faster if he willed it to. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week and had no intention of fixing that tonight.

Mateo and Marco stood just behind him, hovering like nervous family members outside an operating room—familiar enough with the system to understand what was happening, just far enough removed to feel useless.

“As soon as we got the high-gain response,” Tim said, voice calm despite the low buzz of urgency humming through the room, “I queued Prometheus for a full panoramic sweep.”

“You’ve received it?” Mateo asked, leaning in, voice clipped.

Tim didn’t look up. “Sure,” he said dryly. “But I figured we’d all rather watch a blank screen and slowly lose our minds than see what the first human message from M6-117 in five months might look like.”

Marco shot him a warning glance.

“Tim is,” he said through clenched teeth, “our finest comms technician. And we all deeply, deeply appreciate his wit.”

Tim didn’t miss a beat. “You can’t fire me, I’m already dead inside.”

“Tim,” Marco mouthed. Sharp. But not unkind.

Tim smirked and tapped the return key. “Incoming,” he said, almost offhandedly.

The screen blinked. Then—line by vertical line—a panoramic image began to assemble. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly.

The room fell still.

Engineers leaned in, mouths slightly open, trying not to hope too hard. A few people unconsciously held their breath. Somewhere in the back, someone whispered a countdown with each line of image loaded.

The first few strips were barren. Red dirt. Wind-raked ridges. The soft haze of dust in the triple-sunlight. Then the edge of a familiar structure began to resolve—a weather-scored dome, metal-stiff support ribs, just barely visible above the rise.

“There’s the Hab,” Marco said, his voice soft but rising, pointing to the curved outline.

Mateo was already scanning ahead. “Wait—what’s that?” he said, tapping the screen near a shadow that didn't look like a rock or any kind of equipment.

As the next lines loaded, the answer came into view.

A metal rod had been planted in the soil like a flagpole. Taped to it, fluttering just slightly in the wind, was a piece of plastic—something stiff, maybe from a packing crate or a suit panel—and on it, in unmistakably large handwriting, was a message scrawled in black marker:

I’LL WRITE MESSAGES HERE. ARE YOU RECEIVING?

The room collectively exhaled, a sharp sound like a crowd reacting to a sports goal—but no one cheered. It was quieter than that. More reverent. The kind of stillness that forms when everyone realizes they’re witnessing something that will be replayed for the rest of their lives.

More of the image loaded.

Two more signs had been propped beside the first:

POINT HERE FOR YES. POINT HERE FOR NO.

Mateo blinked hard. “She doesn’t even know if anyone’s actually watching.”

“She’s guessing,” Marco said, swallowing hard.

Tim leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “We’ve got a two-hour round trip on comms. She’s asking yes-or-no questions with nothing but a fixed camera and hope.” He gestured toward the screen with a dry little shrug. “This is going to be the slowest conversation in the history of intelligent life.”

Marco shot him a look, but his expression had softened. He wasn't in the mood to argue. He just said, “Point the damn camera, Tim.”

Tim nodded once, then turned back to the keyboard. “Pointing the damn camera.”

She stood barefoot on the edge of the rover’s entry step, the arch of one foot pressed against sun-warmed metal, the other dug slightly into the soft red grit below. Her boots lay discarded a few meters away, kicked off in a moment of impulsive hope.

Her hands—still stained with marker ink, dirt, and grease—hung loosely at her sides, fingers twitching unconsciously as she stared across the makeshift clearing. Her jaw ached from how tightly she was clenching it. Her whole body was wound up like a spring.

The sun—one of the three—hung high behind her, stretching long triple shadows across the uneven ground. It was always day here. Always bright. She’d long since stopped pretending to track it properly.

But now, standing under that endless orange sky, she needed the seconds to slow. Just long enough for her to believe what she thought she’d just seen.

Because the camera turret on the Prometheus lander—dormant for longer than she’d been alive—had moved.

She didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.

It had been still when she finished setting up the message signs—just three stiff cards secured to scavenged rods and spare tie-wire, letters handwritten in black marker until the ink gave out halfway through the second sign. She’d traced the rest using a piece of carbon foil, pressing hard and hoping the message was still legible.

That was all she could do.

No uplink. No antenna feed. No voice. Just cardboard signs and an idea.

The turret shifted again. Slow. Careful. Mechanical.

It wasn’t sweeping the horizon. It wasn’t running a diagnostic pattern. It was deliberate.

Her breath hitched.

She stepped off the rover, boots forgotten, soles pressing into the hot dust. She could feel the sting of grit working into the cracks in her skin, but she barely registered it. Her eyes were fixed on the turret as it paused—held—and then tilted, degrees at a time, until it stopped.

Pointing directly at the “YES” sign.

She gasped—sharp, involuntary, like something had been pulled from her lungs.

Her legs gave out.

She dropped to her knees in the dust, the impact jarring but not painful. Her hands came up to her mouth, clamping down instinctively like they could hold back the emotion breaking loose inside her chest.

Her eyes blurred instantly with tears she hadn’t realized she was still capable of producing.

And then, without meaning to, she laughed.

It wasn’t elegant. It cracked halfway out of her throat and folded over into a broken, sobbing kind of sound—deep, guttural, and helpless. Her shoulders shook. Her body curled forward as the laughter tangled into crying and the crying gave way to silence again.

Not emptiness, though. Not this time.

Relief. Sheer, unimaginable relief. And something else. Something heavier.

Someone was out there. They’d seen her message. They’d understood. She wasn’t just screaming into the void anymore.

“I’m not alone,” she said, barely above a whisper. Her voice cracked, but the words came again. “I’m not alone.”

She stayed on her knees for a while, not moving, afraid that if she stood too soon the spell would break and the turret would turn away. She watched the camera, its stillness now more meaningful than any motion. It was listening. Watching.

The dust settled slowly around her. The heat beat down. The suns moved across the sky, layered and strange.

But nothing else mattered.

For the first time in what felt like forever, she was real to someone again. Not just a blip in a black box. Not just telemetry noise on a server somewhere.

Someone had seen her.

By the time she made it back inside the Hab, her limbs felt like they were filled with sand. Heavy, sluggish, every motion slightly delayed, like her body hadn’t caught up with what her heart already knew.

They saw her.

She hadn’t even realized how much she'd needed that until it happened.

Inside, she peeled off her gloves and wiped the dust from her face with the inside of her elbow. It smeared. Whatever. She’d stopped caring about the state of her face somewhere around sol-whatever-the-hell. She squatted beside the food drawer, muttered a half-hearted apology to the ration packs she’d been ignoring, and pulled out a pouch of rehydrated potato stew.

“Dinner of champions,” she muttered.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, the still-warm packet in her lap. Steam rose gently from the top as she peeled it open.

She raised it toward the overhead light like a toast. “To Prometheus. To whoever’s out there. And to me. For not dying in a crater.”

She took a bite. It tasted like cardboard and regret, but she smiled through it. She was so hungry, and she hadn’t noticed until now. The emotional crash after the high of connection hit like a body blow. Her hands were shaking from fatigue, from adrenaline, from months of pent-up everything.

As she chewed, her eyes wandered to the far wall, where she’d arranged her makeshift “crew.”

There was Captain Stanley, the helmet from her EVA suit, perched on an upturned crate. The dark visor reflected a ghost of her own face. She lifted her stew pouch.

“To you, Cap. For keeping me grounded.”

Propped beside him was Pam the Vent, the cracked exhaust duct that had been making a haunting whine during night cycles until she taped a fork into it. Now it made a different, more tolerable whine.

“Pam, you were right. I should’ve believed the signal would go through.” She winked at the vent. “You’re always right. Moody, but right.”

A beat.

“You still sound like a dying cat when the fans kick in, though.”

Near the airlock, Susan—her ruined boot from the first week, long since deemed unsalvageable—sat filled with loose bolts. She saluted it solemnly. “Susan, your sacrifice shall not be forgotten.”

She exhaled a laugh, small but real. The sound startled her. She hadn’t heard herself laugh for no reason in a long, long time.

Only the rover, Speculor-2, remained unnamed. She referred to it only by its designation. A sign of respect. Or maybe distance. She wasn’t sure anymore.

“You don’t get a name,” she said aloud between bites. “You’re the only one still doing your damn job.”

The rover sat just outside the Hab, its silhouette barely visible through the dusty porthole—motionless, but unmistakably there. Same position she’d left it in after dragging Prometheus into place. Just behind it, the lander’s antenna still pointed skyward, unmoving now, but resolute. Silent, but not alone.

Y/N leaned her forehead against the window, her breath fogging a patch of glass. The heat from the rehydrated food she’d finally forced herself to eat was slowly working its way back into her core, settling in her chest, behind her ribs.

Her voice, when she spoke, was soft—half to herself, half to the rover outside. “I mean, I could name you,” she murmured. “But let’s be honest, that’s just asking for it. The last three things I named either exploded, got moldy, or betrayed me by freezing solid in the middle of a repair.”

She watched the still form of Speculor-2 through the haze of dust and reflected light. “Besides,” she added, almost apologetically, “you’re the only one that hasn’t let me down. I think that earns you your full title.”

The silence on the other side of the glass didn’t answer. But it didn’t feel empty, either. Not anymore.

She finished the meal in slow, methodical bites—every muscle still recovering from adrenaline. When the pouch was empty, she tossed it toward the waste bin. It hit the rim and bounced onto the floor. She stared at it. Didn’t move. Just let it be.

Instead, she crawled toward the center of the Hab, dragging her tired limbs like dead weight, and pulled a flattened ration box from beneath her bunk. It had been waiting there for days—saved for a moment when she had something worth putting on it.

She grabbed her old utility marker, shaking it a few times until the ink grudgingly agreed to cooperate, and began sketching out a rough circle. Segmented. Crude. But functional.

“Okay,” she muttered, drawing in more detail as she worked. “Here’s the plan. You,” she said, tapping the rough shape of the lander on her makeshift diagram, “are now my communications officer. Congratulations. No training, no pay, but full responsibility for the emotional well-being of a stranded astronaut.”

She paused and looked toward the lander through the port again.

“Don’t screw it up.”

She kept drawing. Lines, angles, numbers. She spoke as she worked, narrating like she was teaching a class no one had signed up for.

“We’ve got a two-hour delay round-trip. So no witty banter, no debates, and definitely no sarcasm unless it’s really, really well-timed.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and kept going. “The camera can rotate a full 360. I’m dividing it into sixteen equal sectors—hexadecimals. Each one corresponds to a character. You rotate to a segment, that’s your letter. Point, pause, reset. Repeat.”

She sat back, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. “It’s going to be slow. Like, glacial. But it’s language. It’s mine. It’s… contact.”

Her gaze drifted toward the far corner of the Hab. The broken vent—Valerie—let out its usual high-pitched whine. She smiled.

“You hear that, Val?” she said. “We might actually get a conversation going in here that doesn’t involve me assigning personalities to heating components.”

She looked over to the EVA helmet she’d propped up on a supply crate weeks ago. Its black visor faced her like a mirror.

“Stanley, don’t look at me like that. I know it’s weird. It’s been weird for a while.”

A pause. A breath.

“But it’s working. Something’s working.”

She turned on her personal log, the soft red light blinking awake on the little camera perched above the console. It had been dark for a while. No point in recording when you’re not sure anyone’s out there to listen.

But now?

She leaned in close, brushing dust off her face with the back of her hand. Her hair stuck to her temples, damp with sweat. Her eyes were still rimmed with exhaustion, but they were clear. Focused.

“Day… unknown,” she said, voice hoarse but steady. “The suns never set here, so time’s been more of a suggestion than a measurement. My sleep cycle’s shot, I think I hallucinated a second Valerie the other night, and I’ve been arguing with a space boot I named Susan.”

She smiled—wry, tired, but real.

“But today, the Prometheus camera responded. It moved. It pointed to YES.”

She let the words sit there, hang in the air like they deserved to.

“That means someone saw my signs. It means someone’s listening. I don’t know who it is yet. Could be NOSA. Could be a university relay team. Could be a maintenance AI that accidentally found me while looking for a comet.”

She chuckled quietly, then tapped a finger against her temple.

“Doesn’t matter. Someone’s there. I’m not just shouting into dust anymore.”

She reached over and picked up the sheet of cardboard with her communication circle. The lines were uneven, hand-drawn, but precise enough to work.

“I’m going to teach Prometheus how to talk again. One letter at a time. Using hexadecimals. Because 26 letters don’t fit evenly into 360 degrees, and I’m not about to eyeball that math. Base sixteen is cleaner. And besides…” She shrugged. “Old code habits.”

Her tone softened, eyes trailing back to the camera feed from outside.

“Thank you,” she said, quietly.

She didn’t say more. She didn’t need to.

She turned off the recording and sat there on the floor, cross-legged, arms folded over her chest, head tipped back against the wall.

Outside, through the porthole, the rover stayed still. The lander didn’t move.

The red sands of M6-117 stretched outward in every direction, as if the world had been poured out in one long, unbroken breath and then left to harden under the brutal glare of three unrelenting suns. There was no horizon here—at least not one that felt real. The light smeared everything flat. There were no true shadows, just overlapping ghosts in odd directions, triple-cast silhouettes that shifted slightly as the suns moved in their slow, endless circuits across the sky.

The planet wasn’t quiet, exactly. The wind was a constant whisper—soft, dry, hissing over the sand like it was trying to wear everything down to bone. Even the stillness had teeth.

Out past the main hatch, near the base of the Prometheus lander, Y/N crouched in the dust. Her knees ached in the suit’s rigid frame. Her fingers cramped every time she tried to flex them, the gloves thick and uncooperative. But the cards had to be exact.

Sixteen of them in total, each one an off-white square marked with thick, blocky characters in permanent ink: A through F, 0 through 9. A hexadecimal ring. Not elegant, but math rarely cared about elegance.

She placed the final card—“F”—into position, carefully tucking the corner under a flat, palm-sized rock. Each square had its own weight, each stone tested and re-tested. The Hexundecian wind wasn’t fierce, just persistent and erratic. It could sit calm for hours, then flick sideways out of nowhere and scatter your careful intentions like confetti. Earlier that week, she’d watched the “E” card lift off like a leaf and skip across the plain, fluttering just out of reach as she’d chased it, cursing until she was breathless.

Lesson learned.

She stood slowly, knees groaning with effort, and took a few cautious steps back. The circle wasn’t perfect—she wasn’t a machine—but it was close. From the camera’s perspective, perched atop the Prometheus turret, the spread would be clear, each card aligned just enough to be distinguishable in a 360-degree sweep.

Her gaze drifted up to the turret, still and silent for now.

But it had moved yesterday.

It had seen.

“I figured one of you had an ASCII table lying around,” she said, her voice muffled by the suit but still laced with something dry, almost playful. “Or a sixth-grade understanding of encoding, at least.”

She allowed herself a tired, wry smile. Then turned, giving the cards one last look—checking for shifting rocks, bent corners, anything out of place—before making her way back toward the Hab.

Inside, the suit came off in stages. Exhausted, breathless stages. Every joint creaked. Every zipper fought her. The synthetic inner lining peeled away from her skin like duct tape from fabric. When she finally stepped free, her undershirt clung to her back, damp with sweat, dust pressed into the creases of her elbows and neck.

She didn’t bother with a full decontamination cycle—just a rinse of water over her face and a few swipes with a towel. There wasn’t enough energy left in her limbs for a full scrub. The dust wasn’t the priority tonight.

She dressed slowly, pulling on a clean pair of NOSA-issue pants—gray, thinning at the knees—and a soft, over-washed t-shirt with the faded logo of a launch site she hadn’t seen in years. The neckline had stretched out. One shoulder slipped as she moved. She didn’t fix it.

Then she crawled onto Gregory Shields’s old bunk. It was narrower than hers, tucked beneath a low storage shelf, but it felt safer somehow. Quieter. The kind of place where someone had lived with intention.

It still smelled faintly of antiseptic wipes and the faint tang of synthetic polymer—a smell she’d come to associate with him. She wasn’t sure whether it clung to the bed, or whether the Hab itself had chosen to remember.

The laptop sat just where she’d left it, perched precariously on top of a stack of filtered water cartridges. It flickered to life with the usual delay, the fan sputtering once before giving in to the boot cycle.

She leaned forward and watched the screen resolve, file folders loading one by one.

HabMaint_Logs_2_FINALREAL

Speculor_Backup_NewestActual

DoNotDelete_GS

And then, tucked inside a dusty log archive, buried three directories deep: a folder labeled simply, “Extras.”

Curiosity tugged at her hand.

She opened it.

The contents loaded slowly, line by line: a list of .exe files and text documents. The file names were unmistakable.

Zork II. Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Planetfall. A Mind Forever Voyaging.

She blinked. Then laughed—quiet at first, then fuller, warmer than she’d expected.

She turned her head toward the small camera she’d propped on the crate beside the bunk, just far enough back to catch her expression.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, holding the laptop up slightly like a game show host revealing a prize, “I give you the hidden emotional archive of Commander Gregory Shields.”

She gave the screen a reverent shake of her head. “Turns out our fearless leader was also a closet nerd. This is like the Smithsonian of digital loneliness.”

She let the laptop fall back into her lap and smiled, eyes scanning the list again.

“I mean, I get it,” she said, more quietly now. “You run diagnostics six times a day. Inventory every bolt and meal pouch. But eventually, you just… want a story. Even if it’s one where you’re alone in a white house with a boarded-up door.”

Her hand hovered over the mousepad.

Then she clicked.

The screen blinked and shifted to a black window with stark white text.

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Y/N stared for a long moment.

The words felt like a heartbeat. Familiar. Steady. Someone had been here before her. Someone had typed into this same blinking cursor and waited for a reply that wasn’t human but was, in its own way, comforting.

She grinned. Not mockingly. Just with recognition.

“Well,” she murmured, “I guess I’m not the only one trying to talk to something that doesn’t talk back.”

She typed:

LOOK AROUND

The response appeared instantly.

You are in an open field...

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, then leaned back against the wall, chin resting in one palm. The faint whine of the broken vent in the corner—Valerie, as she’d named her—filled the silence between lines.

The stack of cardboard hexadecimals sat nearby, their marker ink still drying in spots. Tomorrow, she’d send another message. One letter at a time. One slow, careful spin of a camera. She had a system now.

For now, though, she played. Just for a little while. A game meant for solitary people. Text and choices. Words typed into voids.

She was still alone, but for the first time in a long while, it didn’t feel so endless.

Back at JPL, the room was taut with anticipation. The kind that made people forget to blink, forget to sip the coffee cooling in their hands. Consoles hummed, monitors flickered, and somewhere across the room, someone whispered a half-joke and then immediately regretted it.

At Doug Russell’s station, the tension crystallized. He leaned in close to his screen, an ASCII chart dog-eared beside him, one hand flying across the keyboard, the other adjusting Prometheus’s command queue.

“Incoming,” he muttered, not turning around. His voice was low but firm, the verbal equivalent of threading a needle at 2 a.m. with caffeine instead of sleep.

Behind him, Marco and Mateo stood shoulder to shoulder, silent and tense. Watching. Waiting.

On the main monitor, the live camera feed from Prometheus began to move. Slowly, methodically, the turret scanned across the circle of hand-lettered cards that Y/N had arranged in the dust of M6-117. Each card—labeled with a number or letter from the hex set—was captured in a frame. Pause. Capture. Move. Pause. Capture again.

It was absurd. And beautiful.

Inside the Hab, Y/N crouched at the window, watching the turret turn. The movement was stiff, but deliberate—like an old man raising a hand to wave. It was working.

She pulled her knees up to her chest, dust still clinging to her suit, and smiled.

“Not complaining,” she muttered, watching the turret complete another slow sweep. “I’ll take interpretive dance over silence.”

Later, back inside, she stripped off the outer layer of her suit and settled at her workstation, cross-legged in front of her notepad, the laminated ASCII reference guide spread out beside her like a sacred text. Each number pointed to a character. She traced the values with a fingertip, checking twice before she committed to anything in ink.

The message formed one word at a time.

She paused.

She stared at the page.

Her breath caught, a soft, involuntary sound that surprised even her. “How alive,” she repeated, barely a whisper.

It was such a simple question. But it undid her.

She sat still for a long time, pen hovering just above the paper. Then, slowly, she began to write.

Impaled by big monster bone. Dragged away into dark. Hid in cave. Civilians had reason to think me dead. Not their fault.

She scratched the last word three times before she was satisfied it looked like she meant it.

Later that night, she climbed into the Speculor rover and hooked into the command system. The console flickered to life. Her fingers, still sore, flew over the keys, typing out each carefully chosen instruction.

The screen glowed blue in the dark.

She turned the dashboard camera toward her. It was propped with a zip tie and a strip of old sensor tape. Shaky but serviceable.

“Now that we can have more complicated conversations,” she said, breath fogging the inside of her faceplate just a little, “the smart people at NOSA sent me instructions on how to link the rover with Prometheus’s systems. Just a tiny little tweak—twenty lines of ancient operating system code—and boom.”

She gestured toward the screen. “We’re in business.”

As if on cue, a new message rolled onto her terminal.

Dr.Y/L/N, this is Mateo Gomez.

She froze.

For a moment, it felt like the rover stopped breathing. Like the world went still. Her hands hovered over the keyboard. Her pulse pounded in her neck.

The next line arrived seconds later.

We’ve been watching you since Sol 63. The whole world is rooting for you. Amazing job getting Prometheus. We’re working on rescue plans. Meantime...

She read each line like it might vanish if she blinked. The words were surreal. Gentle. Real.

We’re putting together a supply mission to keep you fed until Helion Nexus arrives.

She let out a ragged breath, something between a laugh and a sigh of disbelief. Then typed back, quickly:

Glad to hear it. Really looking forward to not dying.

Back at JPL, Doug let out a laugh as he read the response aloud, and the garage erupted in scattered chuckles. A few of the techs even clapped, unprompted.

But the moment sobered as a new line appeared on-screen from Y/N:

How’s the survivors? What did they say when they found out I was alive?

Mateo’s smile faded.

He looked at Marco, whose face was unreadable. The older man rubbed his temple with two fingers and exhaled slowly.

“Tell her,” he said. “But carefully.”

Mateo hesitated, then typed.

They are safe on New Mecca. We haven’t told them you’re alive yet. We didn’t think it was their business. Your cousin doesn’t know either. He needs to stay focused on his mission.

Y/N stared at the reply.

The words didn’t register all at once. They landed in pieces.

Her hands trembled. She blinked. Then, without thinking, her fingers slammed the keyboard.

WHAT THE F—

She caught herself. Backspaced. Hard. But the anger wasn’t gone. It sat in her chest like a fist. She leaned forward, jaw clenched, and typed again.

What the fuck is wrong with you fuckers.

Back at JPL, Doug winced as the message came through. Several people turned to look at Mateo, who rubbed his forehead with a groan. He typed, carefully:

Doc, please watch your language. Everything you send is being broadcast live to the public. Global feed.

Y/N narrowed her eyes at the screen. The rage hadn’t gone anywhere, but she forced herself to breathe. Once. Twice. Then she typed:

Tell the world I’m deeply, sincerely sorry for my colorful language. You bureaucratic fletchers. Also, go fuck yourselves. Politely.

She hit send.

And then she leaned back in her seat, hands shaking, chest burning, and laughed. Bitter. Exhausted. Free.

It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t composed.

But it was honest.

And for the first time in a long time, somebody heard her.

At NOSA headquarters, the hum of fluorescent lighting pressed down on everything like a second atmosphere. The office felt smaller than usual—walls lined with outdated charts, satellite composite maps curling at the edges, and one stubborn water stain above the far vent that Yoongi had started to take personally.

He rubbed his temples hard with the heels of both hands, then slammed the receiver back into its cradle. The sound cracked through the room, sharp and final.

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled through his nose, long and slow, like he was trying to bleed tension out of his ribs.

The door opened without a knock. Creed stepped inside, a tablet tucked under one arm, brow already furrowed. He paused when he saw the look on Yoongi’s face.

“Bad call?”

Yoongi didn’t answer right away. He turned his head slightly, eyes still on the phone, as if it might ring again just to spite him.

“I just had to explain to the President of the United States what a ‘bureaucratic felcher’ is,” he said flatly.

Creed’s expression flickered—half horror, half sympathy.

“I made the mistake of Googling it,” he admitted after a beat. “Regret was immediate.”

Yoongi didn’t laugh. He just scrubbed a hand over his face and sat forward, elbows on the desk, tension still coiled tight in his neck. His eyes were bloodshot. The long days—and longer nights—of political firefighting were starting to show.

Creed stepped further into the room and shut the door behind him.

“She’s not wrong,” he said, his voice quieter now. “We’ve waited long enough. We need to tell the survivors. And her cousin.”

Yoongi didn’t respond right away. He stared down at the scuffed surface of his desk, where his notepad sat open beside a half-eaten protein bar. The pad was filled with names, coordinates, scribbled notes, and one line circled three times: DON’T TELL YET.

He tapped a pen absently against the corner of the desk.

“She’s stable,” Creed said, pressing. “She’s coherent. More than that, she’s functional. She’s asking hard questions. And if we don’t start giving her straight answers—”

“She’s going to stop trusting us,” Yoongi finished.

Creed nodded.

Yoongi sighed and leaned back again. The chair creaked.

“You’re only pushing this now because Mateo’s in D.C. and can’t push back.”

Creed didn’t flinch. “He’s too close to her. You know that. He’s been since the beginning.”

“He’s also the only one who’s managed to keep her talking without her telling the world to go fuck itself in five languages.”

Creed dropped the tablet onto the desk. “Then let her. If she has to scream at someone, let it be us. What matters is that she knows she’s not being kept in the dark. That she’s not being lied to.”

There was a long silence.

Outside, the hum of activity from the floor buzzed on—keyboard clicks, muffled voices, the occasional printer groaning to life. But in Yoongi’s office, the air had gone still.

He looked up finally, met Creed’s eyes, and gave a small, tired nod.

“Okay,” he said.

Creed’s shoulders relaxed just slightly.

Yoongi pushed the notepad aside and grabbed a clean sheet.

“Draft a statement. We’ll have to vet it through the comms team, but let’s get it moving.”

Creed turned to go, then paused at the door.

“She asked us for the truth,” he said. “Let’s give her at least that much.”

Yoongi didn’t respond, but as the door closed behind Creed, he exhaled again—this time quieter.

The Starfire drifted in perfect silence, its silver hull gliding along a stable arc through the deep, indifferent black of space. Stars burned cold and distant beyond the reinforced windows, too far to feel real. The ship didn’t so much cut through space as inhabit it — a man-made ember, tiny and determined, carrying seventeen people and every hope pinned to them.

Inside, though, serenity was in short supply.

Commander Jimin Park stood near the forward observation deck, one hand braced lightly on the edge of a console, the other curled against his jaw, thumb pressing absently into the line of his cheek. His face was still, unreadable, but the tension in his stance said enough. He wasn’t really looking at the stars. He was staring through them.

The voice crackled in from the comms, tinny and practical.

“Commander Park, come in,” said Valencia Cruz, comms officer, from elsewhere on the ship. Her tone was clipped, businesslike — but even over the static, there was an edge of anticipation.

Jimin blinked, then leaned forward and keyed the panel. “Go ahead.”

“Data dump’s almost finished,” she said. “Personal packets are coming through now.”

“Copy that. On my way.”

He pushed off with a practiced ease, shoulders brushing past the low lighting strips overhead. As he floated toward the Semicone-A ladder, he caught a glimpse of Khoa Nguyen ahead of him, already heading the same direction.

“You’re in a hurry,” Jimin noted as he caught up.

Nguyen glanced over his shoulder and flashed a crooked grin. “My kid turned three yesterday. I’m hoping there’s video. Maybe cake. Hopefully something not entirely destroyed by compression.”

Jimin gave a short nod, then turned his focus to the transition zone. As they reached the midpoint of the ladder, the artificial gravity gently reasserted itself — not full weight, but enough to give everything a sense of down. They moved more cautiously, boots finding purchase, hands steadying themselves on the rails.

The rec room was already filling by the time they arrived — not with noise, exactly, but with a kind of restless energy. Voices were lower than usual, movements quicker. People took their usual seats, leaning in toward their terminals, waiting for whatever fragments of Earth they could still call their own.

Val was already at the main console, typing fast, a mug of tea steaming beside her, mostly forgotten.

“Okay,” she announced, glancing up at the gathered crew. “Personals are in. Dispatching to your inboxes now. If anyone gets a corrupted file, don’t panic. Just flag it and I’ll resend.”

“Make sure to skip Zimmermann’s disturbing German niche fetishes,” someone muttered near the back.

Val didn’t even look up. “They’re telemetry logs, and they’re beautiful,” she said in a flat, mocking monotone.

Armin Zimmermann, who had just opened his tablet, let out a sigh without even raising his head. “They are spacecraft health reports,” he muttered under his breath.

Val shot a quick smirk in his direction, then paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

“Wait,” she said. “This one’s different.”

The room shifted. Small sounds stopped �� the clink of a spoon in a mug, the rustle of someone adjusting their shirt.

Val’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a voice memo. Not tagged to anyone individually. Says it’s for the whole crew.”

Jimin stepped closer to the console, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. His fingers rested lightly on the back of Val’s chair, but his eyes were locked on the screen.

“Play it,” he said, low.

Val hesitated—just a second too long—then tapped the key.

The speakers crackled, then cleared.

The voice that filled the room was familiar. Calm, professional. Creed Summers—NOSA’s mission coordinator. A voice they were used to hearing twice a week with updates, mission briefings, and dry observations that occasionally bordered on wry. But this time, it was different. The tone was flatter. Strained. Like someone trying to walk across thin ice without making a sound.

“Starfire,” Creed said, “this is Creed Summers. I’ve got an update. No way to ease into it, so I won’t.”

There was a pause. Just a breath.

“Y/N Y/L/N is alive.”

It didn’t crash over them so much as snap the air taut. Like a fault line giving way.

Khoa Nguyen froze, tablet still in hand, thumb resting against the screen like he’d forgotten what it was for. Across the room, Hoseok Jung slowly sank back into his chair, blinking like he hadn’t heard it right. Val’s hands hovered over the keyboard, suspended in midair.

No one moved. No one spoke.

“She’s alive,” Creed repeated, quieter this time. “Stable. Lucid. Communicating.”

Jimin didn’t flinch, but his grip on the back of the chair tightened. His knuckles paled. His face, usually so composed it bordered on unreadable, had gone still. Hollow.

“We’ve known for just over two months,” Creed continued. “That decision—keeping it quiet—came from the top. I want to be clear: I disagreed then, and I disagree now. I’m telling you because we finally have a stable comm link and a confirmed path for recovery. A rescue is viable. The plan’s already in motion.”

Another pause. Creed’s voice dipped lower.

“You’ll get a full write-up in the morning—timelines, diagnostics, cause analysis. But for now, the important thing is this: she’s okay. She keeps saying none of the survivors are to blame. That it wasn’t anyone’s fault. She was critically injured. She was dragged off the launch path. She doesn’t want guilt. Just wants you to know she made it. Somehow.”

The silence on the ship grew dense, airless.

“You’re cleared of science ops for the next 24 hours,” Creed said. “Use the time. Ask questions if you need to. Summers out.”

The line went dead.

The only sound for a long moment was the low hum of the ship itself—ventilation cycling, a screen blinking somewhere, the dull tap of someone’s fingers nervously shifting on plastic.

Then Khoa spoke. His voice was thin. “She… she’s alive?”

Armin let out a long breath. Not a laugh, not quite. Something quieter. “Frenchie lives,” he murmured.

Across the room, Hoseok let out a sharp, stunned exhale. “Holy shit,” he said, half-laughing as he scrubbed both hands over his face. “Holy shit. Commander. Did you hear—?”

“She’s alive,” Jimin said. But it wasn’t joy in his voice. It was something else. Something low and furious.

He was still staring at the screen.

“They left her behind.”

His voice was barely a whisper.

Val turned toward him slowly. “Commander…”

“They left my sister behind,” he said, louder now, jaw clenched. He wasn’t looking at anyone. “She was injured. Alone. And they wrote her off.”

“Jimin,” Hoseok said gently, “you heard the report. Everyone thought she was dead. No one expected even two of us to make it out of that launch zone alive. You remember what it was like down there.”

“She’s been surviving in that hellhole for months. By herself.” His voice rose again, brittle and sharp. “While we’ve been running scans and juggling experiments and writing status reports. If we had known, we could’ve turned back. We could’ve—”

“No one would have approved a course change,” Hoseok cut in, regret in his voice. “We were already past max drift. And your wife—Jimin, she would’ve never agreed to let you stay out any longer with the baby coming—”

“For French Fry,” Jimin said, cutting him off. “She would’ve understood.”

The words landed like iron. The room went still again.

No one answered. There wasn’t a way to. Because he wasn’t wrong.

Val looked down at her hands, still poised above the console. She dropped them into her lap. Khoa sat quietly, his tablet untouched. Even Armin, ever the rational one, had nothing to say.

Jimin straightened slowly, his shoulders squared like armor tightening. Without another word, he turned and left the room. His footsteps echoed down the hall—deliberate, heavy against the low hum of artificial gravity.

No one followed.

There was nothing to say.

The heat was relentless.

Outside, under the glare of M6-117’s three suns, the red dust shimmered like liquid metal. Inside the Hab, it wasn’t much better. The air recyclers coughed along at half-capacity, the cooling system barely holding a line between unbearable and fatal. Everything smelled faintly of plastic and sweat—human persistence baked into the walls.

Y/N moved carefully, deliberately, her body too tired for wasted motion. A layer of sweat clung to the inside of her collar, sticky and constant. She crouched beside her potato rows, fingers brushing gently across a cluster of dark green leaves. The plants were thriving—miraculously, stubbornly. Small jungle bursts of color and life tucked between racks of salvage gear and oxygen scrubbers.

She lifted a reclaimed plastic jug from under the table, the water inside cool from the overnight cycle. It had been drawn from her own sweat, breath, condensation, and filtered half a dozen times through systems that had no right still working.

She poured it carefully at the base of each plant.

"You have no idea how much you're worth," she muttered to the leaves. “That’s a day of me smelling like gym socks so you can have a drink.”

She looked up toward the mounted camera, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of dust behind. Her tone was light, but fatigue etched her voice like a dull blade.

“Now that NOSA can actually talk to me, they won’t shut up,” she said. “It’s like I won a sweepstakes I didn’t enter. Constant pings, questions, feedback... one guy sent me seventeen different configurations for optimizing light angles in here. I’m sure he means well.”

She adjusted the camera slightly, panning it over the rows of potatoes. They filled almost every horizontal surface now—shelving, crate tops, even a jury-rigged hanging tray suspended from the ceiling with bungee cords.

“I don’t mean to brag,” she said, “but I’m currently the most successful botanist on this planet. Also the only one. But that’s a technicality.”

She gave a small, dry smile and leaned on the edge of the workstation, looking down at her plants like they might talk back.

“They want me to pose for a picture for the next transmission,” she said after a moment. “Apparently, PR back home thinks a visual helps morale. You know—proof of life, survivor smiles, that kind of thing.”

She straightened and lifted an imaginary curtain with one hand. “So, here’s option one: high school senior portrait.” She struck a painfully awkward pose, elbow on the corner of the hydroponic shelf, head tilted at a strange angle. “Or option two: helpless ingénue stuck in a sci-fi melodrama.” She turned away from the camera, glancing over her shoulder with a dramatic pout and raised eyebrows. “Might not land well with a wrinkled jumpsuit and orbital grime under my eyes, but hey—commitment.”

She laughed, a short but real sound, and let the expression fall away.

“Still,” she said, grabbing a nearby notepad and scribbling a few numbers into her log. “This whole ‘talking to Earth again’ thing… it helps. I get regular data dumps now—emails from family, people from Starfire, old professors. Even some from strangers. Rock stars. One message was from the President of Nigeria. She said, ‘If you can grow food in hell, you can write your own flag.’”

She paused and smiled softly. “My favorite’s from Helion Prime Tech. My alma mater. They quoted this old saying: once you grow crops somewhere, you’ve officially colonized it.”

Y/N glanced toward the plants again, then the camera. Her voice took on a sharper edge—still dry, but aimed.

“So technically? This is a colony. My colony. And no offense to the dearly departed of Colony 212, but—” she lifted her chin, lips curled into a smirk—“in your fucking face. This rock is mine.”

It took her longer than she wanted to suit up.

The EVA gear was stiff with heat, the inner lining clammy with the kind of sweat that never really dried. She moved with slow precision, strapping each piece into place, checking seals twice—not out of fear, but out of habit. On M6-117, nothing forgiven mistakes.

The outer airlock hissed open, and the full weight of the suns hit her the moment she stepped outside. No breeze, no break, just three brutal discs crawling across a pale yellow sky, casting triple shadows that splayed outward from her feet like ghostly limbs.

She exhaled, already feeling the sweat bead along her hairline beneath the helmet. The ground crunched under her boots as she walked to the signpost she’d stuck into the soil the night before—a piece of scrap aluminum from a broken equipment crate, bent and planted like a flag.

The helmet cam was already recording, but she reached up with gloved fingers and adjusted its angle anyway, making sure the shot would frame the suns just behind her, the horizon wide and clear. She checked her posture, squared her shoulders.

Then she pulled the card from a side pocket. Standard Hab notepad stock. On it, written in thick, black marker with a slight smudge in the corner, was a single word:

“Ayyyyyyy.”

She held it up next to her helmet with one hand. The other gave a big, exaggerated thumbs-up.

The camera clicked.

That single frame—cropped, corrected for color and saturation, encoded and transmitted through four satellites, then downlinked to NOSA’s secure server on Aguerra Prime—arrived twenty-three minutes later in the middle of a tense meeting.

It projected onto the conference table like a headline. Y/N Y/L/N, alive, dusty, and grinning under her helmet, standing against the scorched landscape of a planet no one thought she’d survived.

Her suit was patched in at least two places—tape visible at the elbow and right knee. The jumpsuit underneath was stained with hydraulic fluid and long weeks of recycled air. But her posture was straight. Her stance confident. Her body language said what no press release could.

She was alive.

She was winning.

Y/N stood in the dust for a moment longer after the picture was taken. She didn’t move. She didn’t lower the card right away. The silence out here was total—no atmosphere to carry sound, no birds or engines or voices. Just the faint static hum inside her helmet and her own breathing.

She stared out at the land beyond the camera’s frame—flat, blistering red-orange, littered with sharp rocks and faint, wind-scarred ridges.

Then she smiled, a little to herself.

She tucked the card back into her suit and turned toward the Hab, footsteps crunching across the cracked surface. Her shadow followed in triplicate.

Around the table at NOSA HQ, no one said anything at first.

Then Alice folded her arms tightly and let out a long breath. “I ask for a hopeful, inspirational survivor photo,” she said, “and I get the goddamn Fonz.”

There were a few muffled laughs, but the mood stayed taut, the kind of tension that never really left these briefings.

Mateo’s voice crackled over the audio line from JPL. “Be grateful she held still long enough to take one. You should’ve seen the first batch—she was trying to photobomb herself.”

Alice shot a glare toward the monitor that could’ve etched cracks in the screen. “I need something with less Happy Days and more… her face. This is going global, not going viral.”

“She’d need to take off her helmet for that,” Mateo said, dry. “Which, you know… would kind of ruin the survivor narrative.”

The room chuckled. Even the interns in the back cracked a smile. The tension thinned for a moment—long enough to feel it.

But Yoongi, seated at the head of the table, didn’t laugh. He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on the image.

“We’ll release the photo as part of the official rescue announcement,” he said, voice calm but clipped. “Tie it to the supply mission schedule. I want public rollout before the next Hohmann Transfer window.”

Mateo’s tone shifted instantly. “Understood. I’m flying out this afternoon to confirm timeline and media assets.”

“Good,” Yoongi said. Then, turning slightly, he added without looking up, “Alice will handle all media appearances.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Mateo’s voice again, mock-hurt: “Et tu, Yoongi?”

That earned a few more laughs around the room.

Alice didn’t even blink. “You gave us the Fonz,” she said. “Now smile pretty for the cameras.”

The suit was getting harder to pull on each time—stiff from dust, from wear, from the countless hours it had spent exposed to heat, strain, and her own sweat. Y/N wriggled her arms into the sleeves, then sealed the chest plate with a firm press until the internal display blinked to life.

O₂ levels: nominal

Suit integrity: 97%

Environmental risk: high

She muttered under her breath, “No shit,” and reached for the toolkit. It rattled slightly as she lifted it, the latches barely holding after last week’s impact when she’d dropped it down the south ravine.

She moved to the airlock out of habit more than thought. It was just another check, another routine repair on the never-ending list. Seal realignment. External circuit relay.

Same thing as yesterday. And the day before that.

The door closed behind her with a metallic shunk, the seals engaging one by one with a soft, pressurized click. The hum of depressurization followed—steady, familiar. She braced herself with one hand against the wall, the other gripping the handle of her case.

Then, something shifted.

A sound—not quite right. A low groan. Material under stress. Then another. Louder.

She frowned, turning toward the seam above her.

The canvas lining rippled like something alive.

And then the airlock detonated.

KRAAK-BOOM.

The sound was deafening. She didn’t even register the pain until she was airborne.

The force hit her like a truck. She felt her body lift, weightless for a terrifying second, then plummet. The sky twisted. Dust. Light. The ground.

She hit.

Hard.

Her body slammed into the crusted surface of M6-117, the impact ripping the breath from her lungs. Her limbs flailed uselessly as she skidded, tumbled, rolled. The world spun in a blur of color and dust and noise. Something cracked—her faceplate. She heard it before she saw it.

By the time she stopped moving, she was flat on her back, staring at the burning sky through a spiderweb of shattered glass.

Inside the helmet, the heads-up display flickered, then died.

For a few long seconds, she didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Then she coughed—a wet, shuddering sound. Blood smeared across her visor. Her head pounded with the deep, pulsing throb of a concussion. Her left shoulder felt wrong—off-kilter. Dislocated? Maybe worse.

But she was alive.

She tried to sit. Couldn’t.

Tried again. This time she made it to her elbows.

From where she lay, she could see what was left of the Hab. Or rather, what wasn’t.

The far wall had collapsed. Twisted metal framed the crater where the airlock used to be. Bits of insulation floated in the thin air like confetti. The antenna was gone. Smoke curled from the side panel like steam off a boiling pot.

And then she heard it—sharp, close. The hiss.

A sound every spacer knows in their bones.

A breach.

Her breath hitched. She looked down. The hiss wasn’t coming from the destroyed Hab. It was closer.

Her suit.

No.

Panic hit her like a second explosion. She twisted, dragging her limbs over herself, hands scrabbling at the seams of her arms, her side, her legs. Fingers trembling, blood-slicked. The hiss was steady now, mocking her, just beneath her ear.

Too quiet to locate. Too loud to ignore.

“No. No no no—” she muttered, her voice cracking.

She fumbled with the toolkit, nearly dropped it. Yanked out a thermal knife and held it in shaking fingers. Her breath was coming too fast. Not enough oxygen left to waste.

She paused. Tried to think.

Then it came to her.

Hair.

She pulled off one glove with her teeth, then reached up and yanked a fistful of her hair from the base of her scalp. It came loose in a painful clump.

She struck the knife’s igniter. The tiny blade sparked to life.

She held the hair to the flame.

It caught instantly, curling into gray smoke.

She held her breath and watched.

The smoke drifted sideways. Curled. Then it flowed with purpose—drawn toward a tear no wider than a pencil lead, just under her right arm.

“There you are,” she whispered.

She grabbed a strip of emergency patch tape—bless whoever had packed it—and slapped it across the breach. Pressed hard. Waited.

The hiss stopped.

She sat there for a moment, hands shaking, heart pounding in her ears, her body slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.

But she was still breathing.

She forced herself to sit up straighter. Blood from her nose trickled down the inside of her collar. Her shoulder screamed with every movement, but she ignored it. Pain was good. Pain meant her nerves still worked.

She reached back into the kit. More tape. A patch for the faceplate. It wouldn’t hold under pressure, but it would get her to the rover if she didn’t waste time.

Each move was deliberate. Measured. She didn’t speak. Not now.

She worked on instinct—training, repetition, desperation. By the time she’d stabilized the suit enough to move, her fingers were scraped raw inside the gloves and her muscles ached with the dull tremor of shock.

By the time she reached what was left of the Hab, the sky had already shifted shades—three suns high and pale, casting long, warped shadows behind her. Every step felt like dragging a deadweight behind her. The suit was torn in three places, patched with thermal tape and a prayer, and every motion sent a warning ping through her helmet’s display.

She ignored them.

Her knees buckled when she stepped over the threshold of the airlock—what used to be the airlock. Now it was just jagged framework, wires frayed and sparking faintly in the filtered sunlight, insulation stripped away like peeling skin.

Inside, the smell hit her first.

Scorched plastic. Char. Burned electronics. And under that—soil. Rich, damp earth, once full of life. Now cold and still.

Y/N stopped in the center of the room and stared.

Her greenhouse trays had flipped during the blast. Rows of hand-raised potato plants were overturned, their roots tangled and limp, snapped stems buried under frozen soil. The water lines had ruptured. Moisture beaded on the shattered remnants of the clear ceiling panels, already beginning to frost.

The small oasis she’d fought for—day after day, breath by recycled breath—had been wiped out in an instant.

She stood there, barely swaying, not even bothering to remove her helmet. Her breath fogged the inside of the visor. Her limbs screamed for rest. Her shoulder throbbed. Her lips were cracked, and her face stung from where the suit lining had rubbed raw.

But the worst pain was in her chest.

It didn’t explode. It didn’t scream. It just ached. A deep, hollowed-out ache. A silence where hope had been.

She lowered herself to one knee. Not gracefully—more like her legs gave out. She caught herself with a hand against the floor, grimacing at the sharp jab of pain in her side.

She stared at one of the ruined plants. Half buried in overturned soil, its leaves wilted and torn, roots still clinging to a chunk of earth like it didn’t understand it had already lost.

Her vision swam.

Tears welled up fast—too fast for her to blink them away. They slipped down her face silently, tracking along the curve of her cheeks, catching in the grime at her jawline.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head hard. “No, no, not now.”

She sniffed, wiped at her face clumsily with the back of her glove. Her hands were shaking, but she pressed them into the floor to ground herself. She didn’t have time for this. She couldn’t afford it.

She wouldn’t cry here.

Not in front of the ruins of her work. Not in the place she’d survived. Not after everything.

She took one breath. Then another. Jaw clenched. Shoulders trembling. But still upright.

Then she reached forward.

Her fingers curled gently around the base of a broken stalk, brushing away bits of soil and tangled tubing. The leaves crumbled as she lifted it, the root ball dangling uselessly beneath.

She turned it over once in her hand.

And then, quietly, she began to clean.

No words. No declarations. Just movement. One wrecked plant at a time. Setting aside what could be salvaged, scraping frost from trays, resetting any equipment that still responded to power.

Her hands were red and raw. Her shoulder screamed every time she lifted something more than a kilogram. She worked through it.

Inside the Speculor, the silence felt deeper than usual.

Not the quiet of rest, or even the soft mechanical hum of a well-running system. This was different—hollow, like something had been taken out of the air itself. Like the space around her had grown too big and too small at the same time.

Y/N sat in the pilot’s chair, hands resting on the keypad, the screen in front of her still dark. The comm relay had synced with Earth five minutes ago. The signal was stable. Everything was ready.

But she wasn’t.

Her fingers hovered, curled and motionless, like she’d forgotten how to type. Like the words, all of them, were caught somewhere between her brain and her hands. Her jaw ached from clenching.

How do you even start a message like this?

She’d practiced it in her head a dozen times. Tried to boil it down into numbers, mission code, survivable facts. But none of it fit.

She closed her eyes, just for a second. Then she exhaled slowly, leaned forward, and began to type.

Thousands of kilometers away, on Aguerra Prime, in a windowless NOSA conference room tucked beneath the main operations floor, the mood was brittle.

Papers rustled. Fans turned overhead, moving stale air that no one was breathing deeply.

Mateo stood at the front of the table, the latest transmission report clutched in one hand, his other braced against the polished steel edge. Across from him, Alice Sung sat straight-backed and silent, her arms folded. Yoongi leaned forward with his elbows on the table, staring at the projection with a tightness around his eyes that hadn’t left in weeks.

Mateo cleared his throat, not because he needed to, but because the silence was pressing in. “The crops are gone,” he said.

No inflection. Just the truth.

“A full pressure breach,” he continued, flipping to the next page though he didn’t need to look. “Vaporized most of the water in minutes. The remaining biomass was exposed to sub-zero atmosphere. Temperatures dropped hard. Anything microbial was flash-frozen and denatured.”

Alice didn’t blink. “How much did she lose?”

“All of it,” Mateo said. “Zero viable regrowth. She’s down to stored reserves.”

A beat passed.

Alice’s eyes narrowed slightly. “How long can she stretch that?”

Mateo’s voice softened, but only slightly. “She still has a full reserve of harvested potatoes in cold storage. Rough estimate: 200 sols. If she rations to the edge of starvation, maybe 230.”

Yoongi tapped the pad in front of him, pulling up the raw numbers. “And combined with current rations?”

“Best-case projection gets her to Sol 609,” Mateo said, meeting his eyes. “That’s a hard ceiling. After that… she runs out.”

Alice’s tone didn’t change. “And the current Sol is?”

“135.”

The math wasn’t hard. The implications were.

Yoongi leaned back slightly, rubbing at his temple. “By Sol 868, she’s dead,” he said flatly.

No one answered.

The weight of it wasn’t in the words—it was in everything left unsaid. The understanding that survival had a clock now. That every tick, every delay, had a cost.

Finally, Yoongi spoke again. “That means we move. No more waiting. What happens if we accelerate the launch window?”

Across the room, Creed Summers looked up from his notes. He’d been quiet until now, mostly watching. Listening. He tapped his pen against his notebook—softly, rhythmically, the sound oddly loud in the tension-heavy room.

“If we move the launch up,” Creed said, “we hit a more aggressive arc. Less efficiency. It’ll cost fuel, and we’ll need to retrofit the shell. But it cuts time.” He flipped a page. “Best estimate: 414-day trip. That’s with minimal margin for slingshot.”

Yoongi didn’t look away. “How fast can we mount and inspect the boosters?”

“Thirteen days,” Creed said.

Yoongi nodded slowly, doing the math aloud. “Sol 135. If we launch in thirteen, we’re at Sol 148. That gives…” He glanced at Mateo.

“Forty-seven days,” Mateo confirmed. “That’s all Marco and his team get.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “How long does a long-range delivery probe usually take to build?”

“Six months,” Mateo said, deadpan.

Yoongi didn’t hesitate. “Then we’re doing it in forty-seven days.”

He pushed his chair back and stood, pressing his palms flat on the table. “I want the schedule on my desk in two hours. Engineering, fabrication, mission redundancy. I want a failure tree mapped before nightfall.”

He turned toward Mateo. “You’re going to call Marco and tell him.”

Mateo didn’t argue. He just gave a tired, resigned nod. “Sure. He loves a challenge.”

Yoongi paused in the doorway. “Tell him if he pulls it off, I’ll name the booster after him.”

Alice’s eyes flicked up. “And if he doesn’t?”

Yoongi didn’t look back. “Then I’ll name the crater after him instead.”

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Aguerra Prime, the mission floor had fallen into a kind of unnatural stillness—the quiet you only get after a seismic shift. Moments earlier, the room had been its usual low-grade storm of movement: soft conversations, data pings, the tapping of keys, the muted buzz of a dozen different systems chattering across their networks.

Now, the air was still.

Screens still glowed. Diagnostics still ran. But no one was reading them. No one was speaking.

The speakerphone in the middle of the room hummed quietly, its last transmission long since finished, as if it hadn’t caught on that the call had ended. Or maybe it had. Maybe it was the only thing in the room that understood what had just landed.

Marco del Castillo sat back slowly in his chair, one hand braced against the edge of the desk. His face was drawn tight, his forehead damp. The sweat wasn't from heat—climate control kept the labs cool. It was the kind that came when the reality of something hit harder than expected. His jaw was clenched, not in anger, but in pressure, as if the weight of what he’d just heard was still settling in.

Across the room, his team watched him. Not waiting for a speech—just waiting for movement.

Marco’s eyes stayed on the speaker for another few seconds, like it might offer him some clarification. A loophole. A way out. But it didn’t. Just that low hum.

He swallowed. “Okay.”

Barely above a whisper.

He blinked. Licked his lips.

“Okay.”

It wasn’t agreement. It wasn’t reassurance. It was just... the first brick laid on a path he didn’t yet know how to walk.

No one else spoke. Even the coffee machine, notorious for burbling at the worst possible times, stayed quiet.

He looked down at his shirt. The collar was damp where it touched his neck. He tugged it loose, tried to swipe the sweat off his palms but only managed to smear it into the fabric of his pants.

“I’m gonna need a change of clothes,” he muttered.

Then, finally, he stood. Slow. Shoulders rolling to life after too long spent frozen. His knees cracked audibly as he straightened. He didn’t bother to hide it.

He looked around—really looked this time. His team wasn’t huge, but it was formidable. Engineers, data analysts, systems designers, materials people. A few interns, all wide-eyed and stock-still. None of them moved. But they were waiting.

He cleared his throat and nodded to himself, as if deciding to take the next step before his body caught up.

“We’re all gonna need a change of clothes,” he said, louder now. “Probably more than one.”

There was no laughter. No eye-rolling or smirks. But the silence changed shape.

Because it wasn’t a joke. It was the truth.

They’d just been handed a forty-seven-day timeline to do what normally took half a year. Design, build, and launch a custom long-range, solar-boosted supply probe—fully loaded, tested, and space-certified. Not for a demonstration. Not for a publication. For a person.

A woman—alone, somewhere on a planet that was trying to kill her by inches.

This was not the job they’d expected when they came in this morning.

It was quiet for a few more seconds.

Then a chair squeaked back. A keyboard tapped once. A screen changed. Someone moved. And then another.

Marco turned to the closest terminal, watching it come alive again. He drew a long breath, the weight in his chest still there, but finally shifting into something useful.

“Okay,” he said, not to himself this time. “We’re splitting into two teams. Twenty-four-hour rotations from here on out. Team One’s on design and integration, Team Two’s on fabrication and logistics. Habitat Systems is priority. I don’t care if it’s ugly—I care if it works. This isn’t about how it looks in a journal.”

He started walking, pointing as he spoke.

“Avionics, you’re with propulsion—make a list of what we’ve already got on-site. If it flies and isn’t nailed down, I want it catalogued. Flight software—start building a stripped-down nav shell. We don’t need elegance. We need function. Communications, link with SatCon and figure out how to thread a signal path between three satellites we don’t even control. Make it work.”

He looked at Materials next.

“If we’re short anything, I want a full manifest on my desk by midnight. Don’t wait for procurement. Raid our backups. Hell, raid the museum if you have to. This thing launches in forty-seven days, or she dies.”

A silence settled again—not the stillness from before, but something more focused. Sharper.

People began to move in earnest. Terminal screens flicked open. Hands reached for headsets. Murmurs returned to the room—not casual, but concentrated. No one needed to be told what this was. They could feel it in their chests.

This wasn’t a project. It was a lifeline.

Marco turned back toward his own workstation, dragging in a shaky breath, already making calculations in his head. Trajectories. Mass ratios. Heat loads. Battery yields under degraded conditions.

He was exhausted. Sweating. His shirt clung to his back. But he didn’t sit down.

There was too much to do.

The Starfire drifted through the velvet dark, a slow glide along its return arc to Augerra Prime. From a distance, it was just a speck—cold metal and old fire reflecting starlight, swallowed by the vast, endless black.

Inside, tucked away from the quiet hum of fusion drives and navigation updates, the rec room felt like another planet entirely. Low lighting, soft music looping somewhere in the background, and a faint hum of life-support systems pulsing through the walls like a heartbeat.

Bách Koah Nguyen slouched at one of the auxiliary terminals in the Starfire’s rec alcove, the ship's artificial night cycle dimming the overhead lights to a sleepy amber. The room was half-empty—just the quiet hum of the ventilation system and the occasional murmur from the corridor beyond.

A glass of electrolyte tea sweated next to his elbow, untouched. His legs were kicked out beneath the desk, one boot tapping softly against the metal base, steady and aimless.

He stared at the blinking cursor in the message field. Just him, a static-filled channel, and a blank screen demanding a letter to a woman stranded on a dead planet.

“Goddammit, Frenchie,” he muttered.

He cracked his knuckles and started typing.

Frenchie,

Apparently, NOSA’s decided we’re allowed to talk to you again. And lucky me—I drew the short straw. So… hi. I guess.

He scowled, reread the line, then deleted the last sentence.

Frenchie,

Apparently, NOSA’s letting us talk to you now. And lucky me—I get the honors. Just me and this stupid interface.

A small grin tugged at his mouth.

He kept going.

Sorry everyone left you behind. I’d say it was personal, but let’s be honest—you’re not that interesting.

He leaned back, reading it out loud under his breath with mock solemnity.

It’s roomier without you here, though. We’ve been splitting your workload—still no replacement. NOSA moves at the speed of moss. But hey, it’s only botany. Not real science, right?

He paused, hesitating for half a breath, then added:

How’s the planet? Healing okay? Quỳnh made me ask. She says hi. Swears she likes you more than me. Unclear if that was a joke.

He smirked, hit send, and spun the chair halfway around to stretch his legs. Quỳnh would kill him if she saw what he’d written. Or at least make a pointed comment over dinner and then beat him at cards in front of their kids.

The inside of Y/N’s speculor was a cramped oven by mid-sol, the temperature gauge flickering just below caution-red. The screen glowed pale blue in the darkened cabin, casting a cool light across her face, which was smudged with dust and exhaustion. Her hair had been cut short weeks ago—poorly, out of necessity—with thick sections buzzed unevenly to keep from snagging in her helmet.

When the ping came through, she sat up straighter, already half-smiling. Her eyes scanned the message. She barked a short laugh. It echoed oddly in the enclosed space.

“He’s such a dickhead,” she said, amused more than annoyed.

She cracked her knuckles and leaned in.

Koah, M6 is lovely this time of year. No bioraptors since sunrise, which is honestly a personal best. The injury healing fine. Sand in everything, winds like a brick wall, zero humidity. You’d hate it.

Her fingers moved faster now.

Tell Quỳnh I love her for checking in and that she’s objectively correct—I am more likable than you. But she loves you the most, don’t be a baby. How are the kids? Tell my Báo Bun I said happy birthday. Please. I think I missed it. Days blur here.

She hesitated, then added quietly:

Time’s getting slippery. I talk to a vent. I named my EVA helmet. I narrate things to a camera like it’s a friend and not just a blinking red dot. It's getting weird. I miss people.

Her jaw tensed. She exhaled and kept going.

Also, I did blow up the Hab. Long story. Mostly oxygen. Partially my fault. On the bright side, all of Captain Marshall’s disco collection survived the fire. Divine punishment, I guess. Tell Zimmermann. He’d appreciate that.

She glanced at the fuel gauge on her aux battery and typed faster.

How’s the Starfire? Still smell like a rusted can and depression? I walked today—just me, long horizons, and high ceilings. You’d hate it. No chairs. No coffee. Tell the crew I said hi. And tell Jung he still owes me fifty credits from poker. I may be marooned, but I’m not letting that go.

She read it over, didn’t bother to edit, and hit send.

Y/N leaned back in the worn pilot’s chair, the padding long since flattened beneath her weight. Her shoulders sank into the frame, her neck rolling slowly against the edge of the headrest with a dull crack. The gesture wasn’t one of comfort—just survival. The closest she could get.

She closed her eyes.

Her whole body ached—not sharp pain, just the kind that lingered, like soreness that had taken up permanent residence in her joints. Her knees were stiff. Her lower back pulled with every breath. The skin on her hands felt raw under the gloves, the kind of tired that wasn’t from one bad night but from all of them.

Still, there was a quiet inside her chest now—a loosening of something she'd been carrying around for weeks without realizing. Just a little slack in the knot. No miracles. Just a few words on a screen from someone who remembered who she was.

Back on the Starfire, Koah barely shifted in his seat when the response pinged in. He opened it and scanned the message in silence, his mouth twitching as he read.

Helmet names. Talking to vents. The fire. The disco.

He let out a sharp breath of laughter when he hit the part about the Hab explosion, loud enough to make Val, seated at the next terminal, lift her head.

“What?”

“Y/N blew something up,” Koah said, grinning.

Val raised an eyebrow. “That is the least surprising thing I’ve heard today.”

He nodded, still smiling as he typed out a reply:

Copy that. Will relay to Jung. Still not paying.

He sent it. Then sat back, drink in hand, and stared at the terminal’s blank screen. He thought about saying something else. Asking something real. But the words didn’t come.

On M6-117, the glow from the message faded from Y/N’s screen as the terminal timed out.

She didn’t linger. There wasn’t time for it, not here.

The lightness that had crept in during the exchange was already being swallowed by the reality around her. The inside of the Hab still smelled faintly like burnt polymer and battery acid—residue from the fire that had nearly taken the whole station out. That smell had a way of clinging to everything. Her suit. Her tools. Her skin.

The inner wall was holding, more or less. The last repair—a patchwork quilt of insulation fabric, scavenged hull plating, and stubborn optimism—still looked solid. But the airlock was a different story. The blast had peeled open the lower quadrant like a can lid. The edges curled inward, jagged and blackened, the whole structure groaning with every change in temperature.

Y/N dragged a roll of synthetic canvas across the floor, one end slung over her shoulder, her feet crunching over scattered debris. She didn’t talk. She didn’t think. She just moved. Her breath was shallow, labored more from rationed air than from exertion. The silence around her felt thicker than usual—too still, too watchful.

She knelt at the base of the breach and began layering the canvas, her hands stiff inside the gloves. She worked fast but methodically, following the emergency repair schematic by memory: cross-seal pattern, spiral tension reinforcement. The duct tape unspooled with a series of harsh, ragged rips that echoed through the Hab like tiny gunshots.

Her hands trembled by the time she pressed the last strip flat.

She stepped back slowly, breath catching in her throat. The patch was ugly. Lopsided. But sealed.

“Not pretty,” she murmured, voice barely audible over her own heartbeat. “But let’s see what you’ve got.”

She crossed the room to the repressurization panel and keyed in the sequence. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the hiss began—low and deliberate as air filtered into the chamber, volume climbing slowly. The canvas at the airlock flexed. Bulged. Tensed.

Y/N didn’t breathe.

The panel beeped.

Pressure: Stable.

She slumped against the nearest wall, her legs folding beneath her as she slid to the floor, forehead pressed to the cool metal. Her heart was thundering in her chest, her lungs trying to decide whether they trusted the air again.

She let herself sit there for a minute. Maybe two.

Then she pushed up. Staggered a little, caught herself, and kept going.

There was always more to do.

Outside, the light had shifted. One sun was sinking low, casting long amber streaks across the sand. Another was just beginning to rise, painting the sky with a sickly kind of lavender haze. The third hung high overhead, thin and distant.

Inside the Hab, Y/N crouched beside one of her supply crates. She opened the lid slowly, as if hoping something new might be inside this time.

There wasn’t.

Potatoes. Shriveling, sprouting, some soft to the touch. She sorted through them one by one, inspecting for mold, for rot, for anything salvageable. She didn’t count them anymore. She knew what she had. Knew how long it would last. But the ritual mattered.

Each one passed through her hands like a silent marker of time.

She wasn’t counting calories. She was counting days.

A gust of wind rattled the outer shell. The canvas seal whispered as it flexed, tugged by the pressure difference.

Y/N’s head snapped up. She stared at the airlock.

Her chest tightened.

The fear was never gone. It just sank down for a while—waited. She clenched her jaw, turned back to the crate. Kept working.

Her fingers landed on the last potato.

She paused, thumb brushing its uneven skin.

Then, very softly, she lowered the lid and leaned forward until her forehead rested against it.

“Keep going,” she whispered to no one. “Just keep working.”

And she did.

Dean Marblemaw was half-hanging off his tiny faux-leather loveseat, one leg dangling off the side, the other curled awkwardly beneath him. His head was tilted at a painful angle that would all but guarantee a neck cramp by morning. He snored softly, the sound rhythmic and oddly reassuring, like an idling machine in sleep mode.

The only light in the room came from his computer monitor, which bathed the walls in a cold, blue glow. Orbital data crawled across the screen in endless loops—trajectory estimates, fuel deltas, burn timings, and window alignments. The cursor blinked patiently in a corner, waiting for someone to care.

A knock broke the stillness.

It was hesitant. Like whoever was on the other side wasn’t entirely sure they wanted to be there.

“Dean?” came a voice, low and tired.

Rory Bozzelli poked his head into the office, his face framed by the soft backlight of the corridor. His tie was loose. His eyes were glassy with the particular kind of fatigue you only got from too many consecutive 2 a.m. meetings and caffeine crashes.

Dean stirred with a grunt, brow furrowing as his eyelids fluttered open. He looked around like he wasn’t entirely sure where he was.

“Dean,” Rory said again, stepping inside. “Wake up. Sorry. They’re asking for the probe courses.”

Dean blinked slowly, then groaned and hauled himself upright with a kind of grim determination. He rubbed at his eyes with both hands, blinking away the fog.

“What time is it?” he rasped, voice thick with sleep.

“Three-forty-two,” Rory said, glancing at his watch like it was mocking him. “A.M., not that it matters anymore.”

Dean reached blindly for the mug on the small table beside the couch—his go-to cup, beige with the faded NOSA logo almost rubbed off. He took a generous swig without thinking.

He didn’t even swallow. The look of betrayal on his face was immediate. He leaned over and spat the cold, curdled sludge directly onto the carpet with no ceremony at all.

Rory grimaced. “Bold move.”

Dean wiped his mouth on his sleeve, waving the offense away like it was a minor inconvenience.

“I keep hoping one of these times it'll have magically turned back into coffee.”

“No such luck. Time travel’s not in the budget,” Rory said, then crossed the room to stand behind the desk. “Anyway, we need something they can lock onto. Doesn’t have to be pretty. Just has to be technically possible.”

Dean nodded, eyes still adjusting to the light, brain lagging a few seconds behind his hands as he fumbled through the disorganized pile of notes spread across his desk like fallen leaves. Pages were covered in sketches, scribbles, and equations scrawled in every direction.

“I know we’re working backwards,” Rory continued, dropping into the chair opposite him. “But no one's going to greenlight a hard launch date with this many unknowns. We need ballpark figures. Even soft projections would help.”

Dean finally found the page he was looking for and tapped it with a pencil, the graphite worn down to a nub.

“All twenty-five models converge at seven hundred thirty days to intercept,” he said, voice still hoarse. “There’s some variation in thrust profiles—different durations, minor fuel deviations—but it all averages out. Worst-case, we're talking maybe three percent delta-v difference. Not enough to change the math.”

Rory leaned over to get a better look at the figures. “Seven thirty’s... not ideal. It’s a long haul.”

“Tell me about it,” Dean muttered. He was already flipping through a second notebook. “Aguerra and M6-117 are completely misaligned this cycle. Honestly, it’s borderline punitive.”

He stared down at the trajectory model on the screen for a long beat, blinking in slow motion as something clicked behind his eyes. His fingers stilled.

“Almost easier to what?” Rory asked.

Dean didn’t answer right away. His gaze had gone distant, eyes unfocused—not distracted, just deep in the zone where his mind did its best work. The gears were turning.

“Dean?” Rory said again.

Dean stood up abruptly, stretching his arms above his head with a groan, then wandered toward the door like he’d forgotten Rory was in the room.

“Coffee,” he muttered.

“Almost easier to what?” Rory pressed, trailing after him now. “You said it’s almost easier—what’s the rest of that thought?”

But Dean was already halfway down the hallway, muttering under his breath about eccentric orbits and slingshot vectors. One hand ran through his hair, the other gesturing vaguely at the air, like he could see the math floating there in front of him.

Rory stopped in the doorway and sighed, watching him go.

“You understand I’m technically your boss, right?” he called after him, no real heat behind it.

Dean didn’t answer. He rarely did when he was thinking like this.

Rory shook his head, lips curving into a tired, reluctant smile. He didn’t know where Dean’s thoughts were heading—but if past experience was anything to go by, it would either be a breakthrough or a fire hazard.

Either way, it was probably worth hearing.

Mateo stood in the center of NOSA’s mission control floor, one hand resting lightly on the edge of April’s console. The room buzzed softly with quiet activity—keyboards clacking, soft beeps from telemetry feeds, the occasional low voice trading numbers—but beneath it all, there was a tension that didn’t show on anyone’s face, but could be felt in the air. The kind that came when the margin for error had evaporated days ago.

He watched the satellite path update on the central display before beginning his dictation. April’s fingers were already poised above the keyboard, her eyes flicking between the screen and Mateo’s face.

“The probe will take four hundred fourteen days to reach you,” Mateo began, voice steady, deliberate. “It’ll carry enough food to get you through to the Helion Nexus rendezvous. We got lucky—one of the colony preloads was already scheduled to pass through that sector.”

April paused just long enough to glance up at him, a small curve forming at the corner of her mouth. “Tell her about the name,” she said quietly.

Mateo’s tone softened, just slightly. “We’re calling the probe Iris,” he said, watching the words appear on the screen as April typed. “After the Greek goddess who moved between worlds at the speed of wind. She’s also the goddess of rainbows. You’d like her.”

Inside the speculor, Y/N sat hunched over the terminal, legs drawn up to her chest. The message blinked onto the screen, and she read it in silence, the corner of her dry, cracked lips twitching into something just shy of a smile.

Mateo’s voice lived in her head now. Not in a dramatic way—just a familiarity, a rhythm. Even reading, she could hear his inflection. She stared at the words for a moment longer before typing back.

Gay probe coming to save me. Got it.

She hit send.

Back at NOSA, the message popped onto April’s screen. She read it, blinked, then laughed—actually laughed—and turned in her chair to read it aloud.

Mateo groaned softly, dragging a hand down his face. “Jesus, Y/N.”

A few people nearby cracked up, grateful for the tension break. Someone at the back muttered, “Can we print that on the mission patch?”

April was still smiling as she cleared the message. For a moment, the pressure lifted. Just a moment.

Down the hall from the light of mission control, the NOSA briefing room was silent. No alerts. No monitors blinking with incoming messages. Just a single long table, half-drunk coffee cooling beside notepads, and a whiteboard filled with timelines that had already become obsolete.

This was the part of the building where optimism went to get audited.

Yoongi stood at the head of the table, sleeves rolled up, tie undone, the weight of the moment visible in the way he gripped the back of a chair. His knuckles were pale, the veins on his forearms raised like cables. He didn’t need to raise his voice—he never did—but the silence that surrounded him wasn’t respect so much as inevitability. Everyone here knew what was at stake.

He stared at the latest report in his hands for a long beat, then tilted it toward the overhead light.

“The two hundred million dollar question,” he said dryly.

Then he squinted, leaned closer.

“Correction—five hundred.”

No one laughed.

Yoongi didn’t expect them to. His eyes moved from person to person, reading the faces in the room like mission telemetry. No one looked surprised. Everyone looked exhausted.

He cleared his throat. “So. Let’s get to it. Is this probe going to be ready in time?”

Across the table, Marco Moneaux looked like he was held together by sheer caffeine and irritation. His shirt was rumpled. His glasses were crooked. He hadn’t touched the cup of coffee in front of him. His fingers drummed once on the tabletop, then stopped.

“We’re not there,” Marco said, no sugarcoating. Just fact. “We’re behind.”

“How far behind?” Yoongi asked. No frustration. Just calculation.

Marco leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his face like he was trying to wipe off the last forty-eight hours. “Fifteen days. Minimum. If I had fifteen more, we could finish integration, validate all systems, run two full test loops, and sign off without crossing our fingers.”

Yoongi didn’t flinch. He turned slightly toward Mateo, who stood against the far wall with his arms folded, watching quietly.

“Mounting takes thirteen,” Yoongi said. “Can we buy time there?”

Mateo unfolded his arms. “Technically, the hardware mount takes three. We added ten days for failure scenarios, interlock sequences, and redundancy checks. I could compress that. Maybe down to two.”

“That gives us one day,” Yoongi said. “We still need fourteen more.”

The room quieted again.

Yoongi turned back to the table. “What about testing and inspections?”

No one spoke.

Because they all knew what he was asking.

Creed, seated near the end, finally leaned back in his chair. “You’re not seriously considering skipping the final inspections.”

Yoongi’s voice stayed even. “I’m asking how often they catch something that would actually stop the launch.”

Still, no answer.

Mateo exhaled slowly through his nose, then said, “One in twenty. That’s about the failure flag rate on final inspection. Most are minor. Some aren’t.”

Yoongi locked eyes with him. “So there’s a 95% chance nothing critical shows up.”

Mateo didn’t nod. “There’s a 5% chance we kill her before the probe even reaches orbit.”

The room went still.

Someone shifted in their chair. Paper rustled faintly. The HVAC kicked on overhead with a low, steady hum, like the building itself was holding its breath.

Yoongi didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked down at the report again, not because he needed to, but because it gave him something to do with his hands.

Then he looked over at April, who had been standing quietly near the doorway, her tablet pressed against her chest like a shield.

“Tell Dr. Keller to cut Y/N’s food rations by four more days.”

April frowned. “She’s already running tight.”

“She won’t like it,” Yoongi agreed. “Tell her anyway.”

April hesitated, then nodded and made a note.

Yoongi looked back to Marco. “No final inspection. You’ve got your fifteen days.”

Marco blinked at him, caught between disbelief and relief. “You’re serious?”

Yoongi nodded once. “Dead serious. Get it done.”

There was a pause. A long one.

Then Marco sat forward, a little straighter than before. The fatigue didn’t leave his face, but something steadier moved in behind his eyes.

“We’ll make it happen,” he said.

Mateo shifted, uneasy. His jaw clenched. He wanted to argue. You could see it building in the way his fingers tapped once against the table’s edge.

“Yoongi…” he started.

Yoongi didn’t look at him.

“If this fails, if it doesn’t make orbit—”

“It’s on me,” Yoongi said, quiet but final. “The risk. The consequences. The headlines. All of it. Put my name on it.”

And then he stepped away from the table, his hand brushing the doorframe as he paused to add, “The only number I care about now is launch day. Make it count.”

Then he left.

The door clicked shut behind him.

For a few seconds, no one moved. The weight of the choice he’d just made settled over the room like dust. Unspoken. Heavy. Real.

Then Marco stood.

Mateo followed.

One by one, the room came back to life—not with noise or panic, but with quiet resolve. No more questions. No more hesitation.

They didn’t have time for it.

They had fifteen days.

Y/N sat at the narrow foldout table in the Hab, elbows braced against the edges, hands limp in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the items in front of her: one vacuum-sealed ration pack, two undersized potatoes, and silence.

The red light on the camera glowed steadily in the corner—unblinking, unjudging, and always watching. It had become a kind of ghost in her periphery. A reminder that someone, somewhere, might eventually see this. Or maybe not. At this point, the possibility barely registered.

She exhaled through her nose. Not quite a sigh. Just the breath left over after a thought you didn’t finish saying out loud.

“So,” she began, not looking at the camera yet. Her voice was low, dry. “Update. I’ve been advised to stretch rations another four days. That’s on top of the cuts I already made.”

She reached for the ration pack and held it up between two fingers like it offended her. The plastic crinkled faintly as she gave it a shake.

“This,” she said, “is what a ‘minimal calorie survival pack’ looks like when central command gets nervous.”

Her thumb slid along the seam and peeled it open with a practiced, joyless motion. A faint whiff of synthetic gravy filled the air.

She stared into the pouch for a second, then snorted.

“Oh good,” she muttered. “Meatloaf.”

She said it like the word had betrayed her.

Using a small, dented spoon, she carefully portioned the contents into thirds. One third onto a stained square of thermal wrap she used as a plate. The rest, she scraped into an airtight container she slid toward the back of the table. Tomorrow. And the day after. If she was lucky.

What was left in front of her was barely enough to coat the center of her palm. She studied it for a long moment, then reached for one of the potatoes.

It was warm from the growing bed, spotted with dirt. She sliced it in half, then quarters, trimming each piece down to something she could pretend was deliberate. Not desperation. Just… meal prep.

“This,” she said, her voice now aimed squarely at the camera, “is today’s menu. Potato number... I don’t know. Two hundred something. Maybe more. I stopped counting.”

She held up the grim little pile of food, eyebrows raised.

“Bon appétit.”

She set the knife down with more force than necessary and leaned back in her chair. It creaked slightly beneath her. Her shoulders rolled forward, heavy with the fatigue that came from more than just hunger.

“I used to like potatoes,” she said after a moment. “Grew up eating them. Roasted. Mashed. Fried. Once had this loaded baked thing at a truck stop in Oregon that could’ve solved world peace. But now?”

She looked down at the slices on the table.

“I hate them. With the fire of a thousand nuclear suns.”

She picked up the knife again, chopped off a section of the meatloaf and an edge of the potato, and pushed them into the reserve pile—her little future. The container already looked too small.

“The point is,” she said, eyes still on the food but no longer seeing it, “stretching rations four extra days is a real dick-punch.”

Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, not with emotion but something worse: hollow laughter that didn’t quite make it out of her chest.

Beside the plate, two pills waited. Pale blue. Pain management, according to the label she no longer bothered reading.

She picked them up, held them for a second between thumb and forefinger, then dropped them onto the table. With practiced efficiency, she flattened them with the blade of her knife, the powder scattering like dust. She used the flat of her palm to sweep it onto a potato slice and tapped the edges down so it wouldn’t fall off.

“I’m dipping my potato in Vicodin,” she said quietly. “And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

She wasn’t smiling when she said it. There was no triumph in the words. No rebellion. Just fatigue, scraped raw at the edges and smeared with the thinnest veneer of humor.

She popped the medicated piece into her mouth and chewed slowly, eyes fixed on the far wall. The silence returned, stretching between the seconds like taffy.

She didn’t bother saying anything else.

At Cape Canaveral, the Iris probe stood tall against the pale morning sky, its sleek silver frame already glistening with condensation. Vapor hissed and curled around the base of the launchpad, coiling through the support scaffolding like breath in cold air. Engineers moved around it with surgical focus, checking clamps, seals, telemetry channels—everything twice, some things three times.

There was no room for error. Not this time.

Inside NOSA’s mission control, every seat was filled. The room had that charged stillness of a place on the verge of something irreversible. The kind of quiet that wasn’t really quiet—just full of people holding their breath in unison.

Creed stood in the center of it all, headset on, eyes flicking between monitors. His voice was calm but clipped, the way it always got when the adrenaline started to hit.

He glanced toward the back of the room where Mateo leaned against the wall, arms folded. His posture was relaxed, but the tightness around his mouth said otherwise.

“Do you believe in God, Mateo?” Creed asked, adjusting his mic without taking his eyes off the main feed.

Mateo didn’t hesitate. “Several. My mother’s Catholic. My father’s Hindu.”

Creed gave a single nod, as if that somehow covered the bases. “Good. We’ll take all the help we can get.”

He turned back to his console, voice sharpening. “Flight Director to all stations—begin Launch Status Check.”

A quiet chorus of acknowledgments echoed through the room, each one crisp, practiced, stripped of emotion.

“Prop.”

“Go.”

“Avionics.”

“Go.”

“Guidance.”

“Go.”

“Ground.”

“Go flight.”

Outside, Iris waited.

The countdown clock began to tick—T-minus two minutes—and the room settled into a silence so focused it hummed in the air. At JPL, Marco Moneaux stood with his team in a darkened room, eyes locked on their displays. Alice was pacing in her glass-walled office back in Oslo, arms crossed, phone forgotten in one hand.

Mateo stayed by the wall, unmoving, watching the second hand sweep past each hash mark like a blade.

T-minus zero.

The clamps released.

The booster roared to life, a deep, visceral thunder that shook the ground from thousands of miles away. Onscreen, the rocket surged upward in a column of white fire. The room erupted—claps, cheers, people standing out of their seats, a dozen fists in the air. After everything—the engineering, the recalculations, the fifteen borrowed days—it was happening.

A launch. A real one. And it looked good. For a second.

“Getting a little shimmy, Flight,” came a voice over comms. Calm, but edged with concern.

Creed straightened. “Say again.”

“Guidance reports rotational anomaly—long-axis spin. Seventeen degrees and climbing.”

The cheers stopped mid-breath. On the main screen, the probe jerked slightly, then again—too sharply. Too fast. Red warning lights blinked to life across the room.

“Payload rotation increasing,” another voice called. “We’re seeing lateral instability—probable dismount in the housing ring.”

“Shit,” Creed said under his breath.

On the video feed, Iris vibrated hard, the booster shaking beneath it like it was trying to buck the probe free. Telemetry feeds went scrambled. Numbers flickered. Then: static.

And then—nothing.

The main screen blinked. Froze.

Black.

A single word appeared in the corner in block white font:

L.O.S. — Loss of Signal.

No one spoke.

Creed stood completely still, jaw locked, his hand resting lightly on the edge of his console. A vein ticked in his temple. The whole room seemed to hold itself in suspension, waiting for something else. Anything.

But there was no update. No recovery.

The probe was gone.

He reached for the mic. His voice, when it came, was quiet. Controlled.

“GC, Flight. Lock the doors.”

The command was standard. No one left. No one talked to press. No one speculated outside this room until they understood what had happened.

But the weight behind the words was anything but procedural.

Across the room, Mateo had closed his eyes. His fingers dug into his arms where they crossed.

JPL went silent. Alice stared at her screen like she was seeing ghosts.

Mateo sat alone in his office, still in his shirt and tie from earlier, though the knot was loose now and the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms. The building was quiet—too quiet. The buzz that usually pulsed through NOSA’s command wing had faded hours ago, leaving behind the hum of distant servers and the occasional click of an HVAC vent adjusting to no one’s preferences.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there. His elbows rested on his thighs, hands hanging loose between his knees, head bowed like he was trying to remember how to breathe through a concrete chest. The overhead lights had timed out a while ago. Motion sensors gave up when you stopped moving.

The darkness didn’t startle him. It didn’t even register at first.

It was the cold that finally reached him—the slight drop in temperature that crept in around the silence, crawling under his collar, along his spine. It made him shift, just slightly. Enough for the system to recognize life again.

The lights snapped back on. Cold, sterile fluorescence bathed the room, harsh against the stale air and the untouched coffee on his desk.

He squinted as his computer chimed.

A soft, familiar notification tone.

He turned his head slowly, expecting a routine update. More debris analysis. Another round of impact telemetry. Instead, he saw the sender field.

Relay Message Received—Prometheus (M6-117)

There was a pause in his brain. A kind of quiet click, like a dropped pin landing on tile. His heart didn’t race. It just… stopped for a beat. Then started again.

He opened the message.

One line.

How’d the launch go?

Mateo stared at the screen.

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just sat there, one hand hovering near the keyboard but not touching it. The cursor blinked beneath her words, quiet and steady, as if it wasn’t sitting inside a vacuum of awful truth.

He leaned back slowly in his chair. Closed his eyes for a second.

Then opened them again, because she was waiting. And she didn’t know.

He rubbed his face with both hands, exhaling through his fingers. His eyes burned, not with tears but with exhaustion he didn’t have room for anymore.

He turned back to the keyboard. His hands hovered over the keys.

Then stopped.

Because how the hell do you explain this? How do you tell someone who’s a planet away that the thing meant to save her just fell out of the sky?

He sat there, surrounded by light he didn’t want, silence he couldn’t stand, and a message from someone who still believed there was hope.

And for the first time all day, he didn’t know what to say.

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