Lost in Thought

The Alpha Tirna system has ten planets and a number of moons. He had been to most of them now.

He went alone. Every time. When Muira raised an eyebrow at the first landing he told her they were explorers. That was the last conversation they had about it.

She stayed on the ship. Mostly. When he came back from his outing, she was often standing outside the airlock in her suit — not waiting, or not admitting to it. She found things to look at. Rock samples. Atmospheric readings on her scanner. She looked up when he approached, without a word, or sometimes with a dry remark about having to stop slacking off now that he was back.

There was more significance in what went unsaid between them.

The moons were not hospitable. That was fine.

Tirna II-a: no atmosphere, point-one-eight gravity, barren but silently beautiful. He took the rover out for two hours across iron-grey terrain that gave nothing back in any direction. The silence was total — no wind, no atmosphere to carry anything, just the sound of the vehicle and his own breathing. Helium-3 in the rock. Nothing else of note. He catalogued what there was and came back.

Muira was outside. She appeared to be very interested in the landing strut.

Tirna VI-b: frozen, thin CO2 atmosphere, no life of any kind. The rover crossed ground that was pale and featureless in the way of places that have never had anything growing on them and never will. Chemical water locked somewhere beneath the frost. Eight different resources in the rock — gold and Europium among them, which felt like a joke nobody was laughing at. He took his samples and left.

Tirna VIII: a gas giant, unbothered by the survey. He ran the orbital scans from the cockpit and moved on.

The crew had dinner ready. Model G had started placing the food and retreating without being asked, which was appreciated more than was acknowledged. VASCO asked how it went every time. Fine, he said. Muira didn't ask. She ate and read something on her datapad.

He was a striking figure on the surface of Tirna IV, if there had been anyone to see it. The suit was deep red, the kind of red that had no business on a geological survey — a full-body shell of articulated plates, sealed at every joint, built for situations considerably more violent than sample collection. It caught the pale light of Alpha Tirna and gave nothing back. Even with his face obscured, he looked like a man broken into pieces and hastily glued back together.

He simply stood and listened.

Tirna IV had a sonorous lithosphere. The rock resonated — mineral composition, internal structure, something — and when the wind crossed the surface formations at the right angle the planet made sound. Low. Sustained. Felt in the chest before it reached the ears.

He stood there longer than the survey required. One hand flat against a rock formation, feeling it hum under the plating of his glove.

There was a thought nearby that wouldn't come into focus. The shape of something he'd been carefully not-thinking for weeks. He was almost at it when the comm crackled.

Noel's voice. Sam's funeral was tomorrow. She wanted to know if he was coming.

He looked at his hand on the rock. The planet kept humming.

"Yes."