📖 Stories

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."

The Lodge was quiet.

He arrived just before it began. The common room had been arranged — chairs, people standing at the edges, the particular stillness of a gathering that has not yet found its shape. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the room, his mind and body in agreement that he should not be here, but his last shred of humanity urging him to enter.

Jacob Coe was in the corner.

He recognized him immediately. The last time he'd seen the two of them together, in Jacob's office in Akila, the air between father and son had the quality of something long compressed — not an argument, exactly, but the residue of years of arguments bottled and remembered.

There was a raging voice in his chest demanding that he confront Jacob, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here, and where he got the nerve.

"Did... Did you ever patch things up in the end?"

Jacob was quiet for a moment. He said that all he had ever wanted was to protect his son. That his son had been out the door the moment he was old enough — away from him, from his mother, from everything they had built. That all he ever did was love his boy. That it should be him in the ground, not his son. He said it without anger. That was the part that was hard to listen to. The love and sorrow in it was plain and it had nowhere to go.

"I'm sorry for your loss..."

Cora was on the upper balcony, looking down. Beside her stood a woman he didn't recognize — composed, watchful, with Cora's same quality of taking stock of a room without appearing to.

She introduced herself when he reached them. Cora's mother. She said that Cora would be coming to stay with her for a while. It was probably for the best, after all, that she get away from all the reminders of her dead father.

He looked at Cora.

She looked back at him. The last time she had looked at him her face had been something he couldn't remember without a deep pain welling up in his chest. This was different. The rage was gone. What had replaced it was harder to name — a flatness, a kind of settled emptiness, as though she had arrived somewhere and found nothing waiting.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey" he replied.

She asked what the point of this was. Whether it was supposed to make anything better. He said something about keeping living. About how you had to. He heard himself saying it and knew it wasn't enough even as he said it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"Don't you get it?" she said. "Every single day is just going to be worse from now on."

He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer for it.

Below them, Noel was beginning to speak.

He made his way back down. He stood at the edge of the gathering and listened to Noel speak — about what they had lost, what Constellation had lost... She spoke well, even as she struggled to choke back tears.

When she finished, she asked if anyone had anything they'd like to say.

Every head in the room turned toward him. All of them, at once. He could see it in their faces — the way they’d been watching him since he walked in, the way this universe had been watching him since Vectera, The artifact, the pirates... The Starborn. And...

He walked to the lectern. He felt the weight and the pressure of everyone around him, the new family he'd found since waking up in this world, the people who had trusted him, the people who he had become a sort of defacto leader for...

The weight of their broken expectations.

His eyes glazed over and his focus blurred as they looked back and forth, going through the motions of "making eye contact" without truly seeing anybody. Walter. Mateo. Sarah. Barret. Vasco. Andreja...

There was a lamp on the corner table near a book shelf. The light flickered a moment.

He opened his mouth.

“Sam—”

The air in the room felt stale. The silence, oppressive.

He stood at the lectern for a long time after that. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Eventually, He apologized. It was unclear who this apology was for... Was it to Constellation, for failing them? Was it to Noel for failing to give a speech? Was it to Cora, for failing to save her father? Or was it to the one person not in the room with them?

He wasn’t sure how long he was up there. His body felt like something he was carrying. He breathed slowly. He stepped back from the lectern and moved through the room and did not look at any of them. He walked past a silent gathering of Constellation members. He walked past Vasco whirring quietly in the corner. He walked past the lamp, its light flickering like morse code trying to reach him. He walked down the steps and through the door and out into the cold air of New Atlantis. He walked toward the spaceport.

The ship was where he had left it. Inside there was only silence as Muira sat at a table contemplating some Chunks before her.

She didn't say anything. Neither of them did.

The Lodge was behind him now, Constellation was behind him now, but Cora's words were not behind him at all.

Every single day is just going to be worse from now on.

He sat in the pilot's seat for a long time before he started the engines. When he did, he already knew where he was going.