#pitchblack

[drawn-in-cheddar]

yearly rewatch of Rise of the Guardians. I love this wet rat man, Jude Law VA was the last straw for my sanity 😭💀🤞

[chimcess]

⮞ Chapter Ten: Earthquake 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: 21.3k+ Summary: Presumed dead after the Hunter-Gratzner crash, Y/N is left behind on M6-117, a hostile world where survival is never guaranteed. With only her instincts and stubborn resolve to rely on, she must adapt quickly or risk dying alone on a planet that offers no mercy. As days stretch into months and hope of rescue begins to fade, she is forced to confront the possibility that she may never make it home. Far across the stars on Aguerra Prime, NOSA searches for answers, unaware that Y/N’s former Starfire crewmates are quietly preparing a reckless mission that could cost them everything in the hope of bringing her back. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, body image issues, scars, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: Will she make it or not?

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Y/N moved through the Hab with the careful economy her body had learned over the past few months. She no longer wasted energy without noticing. Sweat gathered beneath the collar of her shirt, and the fabric clung to the sunburned skin across her shoulders, but even exhaustion had become efficient.

Plants occupied nearly every surface she could spare. Trays hung from salvaged brackets above the workbench, crate lids served as shallow growing beds, and bungee cords supported narrow containers along the walls wherever the lamps could reach them. Green leaves crowded beneath the light, brushing together whenever the circulation fans changed speed. The sight still surprised her.

She pulled a reclaimed plastic jug from beneath the workstation. Condensation filmed the outside from the cooler part of the cycle, and every drop inside had come from somewhere—her breath, her sweat, or humidity drawn from the Hab’s air and forced through filters so far beyond their intended service life that the people who designed them would probably have taken the entire system as a personal insult.

By now, Y/N could judge the correct amount without markings. Too much water invited mold and overwhelmed the drainage layer; too little left the leaves soft by the following cycle. She poured slowly, moving from one tray to the next until the soil had darkened enough, and when she finished, a faint smile touched her mouth.

Once communications stabilized, messages had begun arriving during every available window. Engineering recommendations crowded alongside medical questions and psychological check-ins disguised as casual conversation, as though she could not recognize an assessment when she saw one. They probably meant well.

Y/N straightened slowly, bracing one hand against the workstation while her knees protested. The hanging trays swayed gently above her, and her gaze drifted toward the terminal, where unread transmissions waited in a long queue.

Earth was strangely loud now.

There were messages from family, former professors, Starfire personnel, strangers, politicians, and people she knew only from broadcasts. One had even come from the president of Taurus 1, and she still had not decided whether that was profound or insane. A former professor had buried an old saying beneath several pages of engineering notes and supply estimates. Y/N looked around the crowded Hab, and a tired smirk crossed her face.

Well, I guess that settles it.

Beyond the porthole, M6-117 stretched beneath the overlapping suns. Heat shimmer moved across the plain, and wind carried red dust in long, thin ribbons. The planet would not care when she died, but life had taken root inside the Hab anyway.

She leaned one shoulder against the workstation and surveyed the shelter with tired satisfaction. It was ugly, cramped, and humid. Half the equipment housings had been stripped for parts, and tape reinforced so many joints that the place looked less constructed than negotiated into remaining upright.

No offense to the geologists of Colony 212, she thought, glancing toward the endless red plain, but this rock belongs to me now.

The suit was becoming harder to put on. Dust, sweat, and repeated heat exposure had stiffened the fabric until it felt more like heavy canvas than engineered textile, and Y/N had to plant one boot against the bulkhead to force her arm through the sleeve. She rolled her shoulder until the seam settled into place, pulled the chest section closed, and tried the latch twice before it finally caught with a dull metallic click.

She could breathe outside for short periods and often worked with the visor partly open simply to escape the stale air trapped inside the helmet, but that was what made the atmosphere dangerous. Fine particles slipped past ordinary filters and lodged deep in the lungs, accumulating one breath at a time. The suit did not prevent the damage. It only slowed it.

Y/N lifted the toolkit from the floor. One latch remained secured with tape after the case had bounced into the southern ravine the week before, but it still closed, which was enough. Most things on M6-117 worked only in the loosest sense of the word. The Hab itself remained upright through maintenance, salvage, and stubbornness, pretending at permanence long after anything permanent had ceased to exist.

She planted her feet apart and waited for the outer hatch to cycle.

A groan sounded somewhere above her.

Y/N frowned as it deepened, at first mistaking the tremor beneath her boots for something inside her own body. Her pulse had become erratic after too many sleepless cycles and too much caffeine stirred into recycled water, while the damaged muscles beneath her ribs made every breath scrape. The vibration strengthened, low and uneven, until there was no mistaking where it came from.

Something was moving beneath the crust.

“That’s not—”

Metal screamed overhead before she could finish. The outer structure ruptured, and one side of the Hab folded inward as support beams tore loose with a series of sharp cracks. The floor lurched beneath her and threw her sideways just as the airlock ceased to be a sealed chamber.

Storage crates burst open. A radish rack tore from its mounting and cartwheeled across the compartment, scattering plastic, soil, and green leaves through the air. Something struck Y/N’s shoulder hard enough to wrench it beneath the joint, and the toolkit vanished from her hand as daylight poured through the widening gap.

The growing racks tipped in quick succession. Soil spilled in dark sheets, irrigation lines snapped and whipped through the air, and pumps screamed before losing power. Radishes bounced through the wreckage as the eastern supports failed and the ground opened beneath the frame, dragging the connected sections downward while welded joints twisted apart.

Everything loose launched across the compartment. Y/N’s leg caught against something solid, and her shoulder struck rock with a sickening jolt that emptied her lungs. Dust rolled through the air, turning the sunlight copper, while damaged systems groaned as they settled and alarms wailed before cutting out one by one. Water hissed from a ruptured line nearby and disappeared into the spilled soil.

Y/N curled around the pain with one glove pressed into the ground as warnings flashed across her visor. She forced herself onto one elbow, but the world tilted immediately, and nausea rolled through her hard enough to blur her vision.

Something struck the ground near her face with a sharp crack. Silver fractures spread across the visor, branching through the faceplate as red dust began slipping through the damaged seal with a faint hiss. Thin air touched her skin, dry and metallic, and she tasted minerals at the back of her tongue.

Behind her, the Hab leaned violently to one side, half collapsed into a widening break in the ground. Emergency blankets snapped in the wind, an outer wall sagged inward where the frame had folded, and exposed wires spat blue sparks through the dust. The workstation had overturned, storage bins had split apart, and papers lifted into the heated air while cave soil streaked the twisted floor and broken irrigation lines dripped water into the ground. The camera she had spoken to for months hung from a torn cable, swaying gently.

Her HUD flickered once and went dark.

Pain arrived in pieces. Her shoulder ground whenever she breathed too deeply, pressure pulsed through her ribs hard enough to suggest at least one fracture, and fire ran from her knee into her hip. A cough tore through her, followed by the rattle of stone beside her hand.

Y/N went still.

The sensation was not dizziness. The vibration beneath her body was growing stronger, too low to hear properly but powerful enough to move through the ground and into her bones. A second later, the surface bucked.

The Hab gave way again behind her. Half the eastern wall collapsed into the fissure with a catastrophic metallic scream, dragging planting beds, pipes, soil, and insulation into a grinding avalanche. A recycler line ruptured and threw water into the air before the stream vanished into the crack.

“No. No, no…”

Y/N forced herself upright as Sandcat Two rocked several meters away, one wheel already sinking with the ground. Weak warning lights flashed behind the dust-coated windscreen, and she staggered toward it just as the rock split apart beneath her feet.

Dust burst upward. A crack raced across the plain in front of her boots, widening as whole sections of ground collapsed inward. Darkness opened below, and hot air rushed from the depths carrying the mineral smell of stone buried under pressure for millions of years. Sandcat Two shifted toward the edge.

“Hey!”

Y/N lurched forward, but pain tore through her leg and nearly folded the knee. The crawler’s rear wheel slipped over open space as another tremor surged through the crust and threw her onto the injured shoulder, swallowing her scream beneath the ringing in her ears.

The fissure widened beneath the Sandcat. Its tires scraped uselessly at the crumbling edge while the suspension shrieked under the strain, and dust poured around the chassis as one storage crate tore loose and disappeared into the darkness.

“No,” Y/N whispered, dragging herself forward. “No. Come on.”

The crawler continued to slide.

Sandcat Two had carried her across the plain and hauled Prometheus out of the sand. It had served as transport, shelter, and workshop, but more importantly, it held water, batteries, tools, power cells, spare parts, and weeks of work. It was not merely a vehicle. It was what remained of her ability to survive.

She pulled herself closer despite the pain in her shoulder and leg as the crawler tipped farther over the fissure. Metal groaned, the front axle slipped free, and Sandcat Two dropped nose-first with a shriek of tearing steel.

“No!”

Y/N lunged with one arm outstretched, as though she could catch several tons of machinery through refusal alone. The edge crumbled beneath her while the Sandcat slammed into the chasm wall and sent sparks through the dust. Its headlights flickered weakly.

“Come on,” she whispered, hardly breathing. “Hold together.”

The front tires turned uselessly against loose dirt. Red grit poured beneath the chassis while the crawler tipped a few centimeters at a time, and Y/N dragged herself closer even though some part of her already understood that none of it mattered.

The Sandcat could not fall.

Another tremor rolled through the crust and threw her flat. Pain exploded through her shoulder as her grip failed, and she slid backward until one arm caught around a jagged outcrop. The fissure groaned wider beneath the crawler, and its rear axle dropped another few centimeters.

Y/N tried to rise, but her arms gave out. She struck the dirt while white light crowded her vision and copper filled her mouth. She swallowed and remained still until the nausea eased. Vomiting inside the cracked helmet could kill her before the injuries did.

The ground shuddered again. Rock split nearby with a sound close enough to breaking bone that she flinched, but when she forced herself onto her elbows, she could finally see the Hab—or what remained of it.

The far wall was gone. Broken supports jutted from the structure around the missing airlock, and part of the roof had folded inward with a long metallic groan that sounded final. The antenna had vanished with it, leaving only an empty section of twisted frame where her connection to Earth had been.

Y/N stared at the space for a moment, unable to tell where the system had landed or whether any part of it had survived. Before the loss could settle, a metallic shriek pulled her attention back to Sandcat Two.

She dragged herself forward until her injured leg failed completely. Pain ripped through her hip and darkened the edges of her vision, leaving her collapsed in the hot dust while the crawler groaned above the fissure. She remembered sitting inside it during a heatstorm with her forehead against the steering wheel, listening to the engine tick beneath her hands while the wind battered the hull.

“Don’t quit on me,” she had murmured, patting the dashboard. “You and me are all we’ve got.”

Now its headlights flickered through the dust, and smoke rose from a damaged panel before dissolving into the sky. M6-117 did not pause to acknowledge what it had already taken.

Another tremor passed beneath the surface. The crawler shifted, one rear wheel lost contact and spun over the darkness, and metal screamed under the strain.

Y/N forced herself upright. Pain narrowed her vision, but adrenaline carried her forward before her body could refuse. Her shoulder hung wrong, every breath stabbed through her ribs, and Sandcat Two remained barely suspended above the fissure.

She staggered toward the crawler and caught herself against a broken slab when the ground shifted again. Sandcat Two slid sideways, its remaining wheels scraping uselessly against the crumbling edge. Y/N lunged across the last few meters just as the surface gave way beneath her.

She struck the ground hard and began to slide. Dust exploded around her while loose stones battered her legs and hips, and the fissure rushed toward her faster than she could find anything solid to grab. The shotgun struck against her side, and she caught it instinctively as Sandcat Two finally lost its grip and tipped nose-first into the chasm with a shriek of tearing metal.

“No!”

Her scream came out raw, but momentum carried her after it. The lip of the fissure collapsed beneath her body, dropping her into open air as dust, stone, and sunlight spun together.

Y/N struck the wall shoulder-first and twisted away in a shower of sparks and red grit. Her leg hit next, followed by her ribs. The side of her helmet clipped stone hard enough to turn the world white, and the shotgun nearly tore from her hand as she bounced from one projection to another, unable to tell which direction she faced.

Orange daylight wheeled above her while the fractured walls rushed past. Her boot jammed between two outcroppings, but the rest of her body kept falling. A sharp crack sounded inside the suit as her ankle twisted beneath her weight. Pain tore through her so violently that her fingers opened around the shotgun, though she caught the strap before the weapon disappeared into the darkness below.

The stone trapping her boot broke loose, and she dropped onto a steep shelf of fractured rock. She skidded through loose gravel, rolled once, and slammed into metal hard enough to empty her lungs.

For several seconds, the dark surface beneath her cheek meant nothing. It was only hot metal trembling beneath her while the ground continued to settle around it. Dust poured from the walls in thin streams, coating her visor and filling the fissure with a dry mineral haze. Somewhere above, rock continued to collapse, the sounds reaching her through the damaged helmet as distorted layers of grinding stone, tearing metal, and debris striking ledges before falling deeper into the dark.

Y/N remained where she had landed, one arm folded beneath her and the other tangled in the shotgun strap. Her ankle throbbed inside the boot, her shoulder burned with every shallow breath, and something heavy pressed beneath her ribs whenever she tried to move.

The metal shifted beneath her.

Her eyes opened as a weak amber light flickered through the dust several meters below, catching the curve of a damaged chassis and one wheel still turning slowly over open space. When her vision cleared, she recognized a familiar seam beneath her palm. A strip of plating had been hammered over it, cut months earlier from Prometheus’s outer hull.

She had landed on Sandcat Two.

Y/N pressed one shaking hand against the patch. She remembered flattening the metal beside the Hab while Mateo argued through the delayed communications link that it would fatigue under repeated temperature cycling. She had told him the entire planet was a fatigue test and kept hammering. The patch had bowed during the fall, but it remained attached.

Recognition steadied her. The crawler had become a record of every person and every repair that had kept her alive. Bindi’s modifications remained in the rear power housing, Y/N’s rough welds crossed the suspension cage, and Koah’s annotations had been copied beside the diagnostic port. A white line marked one wheel hub so she could tell whether the rim shifted under load.

Sandcat Two had no reasonable chance of surviving the fall, and neither did she.

Y/N lay against the crushed side panel, struggling to draw a full breath while dust drifted around her in thick, rust-colored clouds. Far above, the fissure narrowed to an irregular opening filled with orange-white daylight. The upper walls remained visible, but the light reached only as far as the shelf. Beneath her, the rest of the chasm disappeared into complete darkness.

Something clicked below.

She stopped moving. The sound came again, farther to her right, followed by the slow scrape of claws across stone. It was not loose debris or rock settling after the quake. She knew that rhythm.

Bioraptors.

Panic cut through the confusion with cold precision. Y/N forced herself onto one elbow and dragged her injured leg farther onto the shelf, though a scream escaped before she could stop it. Her ankle felt loose inside the boot, already swelling and unable to bear even light pressure. One wrist had bent badly during the fall, and flexing it sent a bright line of pain toward her elbow. Breathing hurt along the right side of her chest, deep and grinding, but she could still draw air. Nothing appeared to have pierced the suit completely. The visor was cracked and dust leaked through one corner, but the pressure display had not collapsed.

Good enough.

She checked herself again because the first assessment had been performed by panic, and panic was a terrible physician. Her toes moved, and the knee still flexed. Pain spread through the hip, but the joint remained seated. The ankle had rolled inward hard enough that the shape of the boot no longer matched the joint inside it. Her left wrist could bear some pressure if she kept it straight, and although every breath drove pain through her ribs, she heard no wet bubbling inside the suit and felt no sudden loss of pressure.

Her abdomen remained soft around the old injury beneath her ribs, though striking the Sandcat had awakened every damaged layer of muscle surrounding it. Y/N pressed one hand over the scar through the suit, and memory returned with the sensation: the cave after the eclipse, the broken spike still buried inside her because removing it too soon would have emptied her onto the floor, loose stones stacked across the entrance, feelers moving through the gaps.

She had survived by refusing to solve tomorrow’s problem before the current one had finished trying to kill her. The rule still applied. Air first. Light second. Stop whatever bleeding she could see. Internal injuries could wait until they made themselves impossible to ignore.

Most of the suit display had gone dark, but the remaining pressure indicator held steady. Y/N tore a patch from the emergency strip on her shoulder and pressed it over the fracture in the visor. The adhesive wrinkled across the uneven glass, reducing the hiss without stopping it entirely.

It would hold for a while. Forever had never been part of the plan.

She listened again. The scraping below had shifted sideways rather than upward. Something was following the shelf and taking its time, a patience that frightened her more than a direct attack would have.

Part of the ledge lay in sunlight, while the rest remained beneath Sandcat Two’s shadow. Y/N dragged herself toward the brighter section until glare flooded the damaged visor. The creatures would resist crossing direct stellar light. Their eyes and exposed membranes were designed for darkness, not the relentless output of three suns.

She had learned their limits through injury rather than controlled study. During the eclipse, torchlight had made them hesitate but rarely drove them away. Flame angered them. Artificial lamps confused juveniles and damaged their eyes, but a hungry adult would still force itself through the pain if prey remained close enough.

Direct sunlight was different.

When the eclipse ended, Y/N had watched one creature cross the edge of the first beam. It had recoiled so violently that the membrane around its face blistered before her eyes. The smell had been sweet, scorched, and impossible to forget.

The creatures below did not have to enter the light yet. They only had to wait.

The fissure walls divided the sunlight into narrow bands, and those bands were already shifting as the suns moved overhead. A bright line that had reached the Sandcat’s lower wheel minutes earlier now fell short. Her protection had an expiration date.

Beside her, Sandcat Two released a long metallic groan. The rover had wedged itself between two large projections of stone perhaps six meters below the surface. Its front end rested against one wall while the rear hung over the open chasm. One wheel turned slowly in the air, smoke curled from beneath the hood, and loose cargo straps swayed below the storage bay.

The headlights still worked. They pulsed faintly, one brighter than the other, but they remained on.

Y/N looked at the damaged machine through the drifting dust. Months earlier, it would have been nothing more than a reconnaissance crawler. Now she saw water, tools, medicine, power cells, climbing equipment, and every spare component she had been too cautious to leave inside the Hab.

“You stubborn bastard,” she whispered.

A pale shape moved below the ledge and vanished before the sunlight reached it. Y/N tightened her grip on the shotgun.

“All right. We’re not staying here.”

The rear storage hatch had buckled during the fall. Reaching it meant dragging herself around the angled chassis without allowing the injured ankle to strike the rock. She moved in short, ugly stages, pulling with her good arm and pushing with her uninjured leg whenever it found purchase. Each time pain narrowed her vision, she stopped and waited for the darkness at the edges to recede.

The temperature dropped beneath the rover. Its shadow felt several degrees colder, and every rattle of gravel from the ledge revealed quiet movement somewhere below. When Y/N finally reached the hatch, she wrapped her good hand around the handle and pulled. Nothing happened.

She tried again, but her wrist protested immediately, so she changed hands, braced her good boot against the chassis, and hauled until the damaged seal broke with a metallic crack that echoed through the fissure.

Everything below went silent.

Y/N froze with both hands locked around the handle. The quiet held for several breaths before a low clicking call rose from somewhere beyond the headlights and another answered from deeper in the chasm. She forced the hatch open anyway.

Two water bladders remained strapped inside. A portable flood lamp had wedged itself against one wall beside four emergency flares, a length of climbing line, a compact medical pouch, and part of the toolkit she had packed for the Thessala run. One supply crate had split during the fall, scattering connectors and ration packets through the tilted compartment, but the equipment that mattered most had survived.

Relief struck so sharply it almost hurt. Y/N allowed herself three breaths before training took over.

The water bladders were intact, though warm, and none of the flare seals showed cracks. One section of climbing line smelled faintly of burned polymer where it had rubbed against a heated bracket, so she fed the rope through her hands a length at a time, checking the weave for flattened fibers and cuts hidden beneath the dust. The medical pouch held less than she remembered. Most of its contents had been used after Thessala, leaving one compression splint, two injectable pain suppressants, several antibiotic doses, sealant strips, gauze, tape, and a skin stapler she had once described as medieval.

Nothing looked excessive now.

An electrolyte packet had burst beneath the tools, leaving pale yellow powder across the storage wall. Y/N gathered as much as she could into a clean ration wrapper. A person became reverent about salt after learning how quickly the heat could strip it from the body.

Behind a tool crate, she found a short spool of blue cord. Bindi had used the same kind to mark anything she did not want the rest of the crew touching, always tying it with an ugly doubled knot that could only be opened by worrying at it with a fingernail. The cord had no structural value, but Y/N pulled it free and wrapped it around the medical pouch anyway. The gesture accomplished nothing practical. It steadied her hands.

Bindi would have looked at the angle of the crawler, spat into the dust, and declared it only mostly fucked. Afterward, she would have found the one load-bearing point everyone else had missed.

Y/N tried to see the wreck the way Bindi would have—not as one ruined machine, but as separate systems. Frame. Axle. Storage. Winch. Power. A damaged component could still be useful even when the vehicle around it had failed.

“Show me what still works,” she murmured.

She pulled the medical supplies into the sunlight and started with her wrist. The joint was badly bruised and already swelling, but it remained aligned when she straightened it. Her ankle was worse. Y/N loosened the boot and pressed two fingers along the outside of the joint, sending nausea surging into her throat.

Nothing had broken through the skin, and she could still move her toes. Whether it was a severe sprain or a clean fracture could not be determined without imaging, but the distinction no longer mattered. The joint had to be immobilized.

She injected the pain suppressant through the suit access above her knee. The medication burned into the muscle and dulled only the sharpest edge of the pain. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have removed the boot before splinting the ankle, but if she took it off now, the swelling might prevent her from getting it back on. Bare skin inside the fissure meant cuts, contamination, and no protection during the climb. Instead, she loosened the upper seal and worked the compression brace beneath the fabric.

When she tightened it, her toes began to tingle. Y/N eased the brace back half a turn and checked again.

Better.

The shorter splint went around her wrist, secured with most of the remaining tape. She tested the shotgun strap, which pulled painfully across her ribs but freed both hands, then arranged the rest of the equipment where she could reach it. One flare went on the front of her harness, the flood lamp clipped to the opposite side, and the water bladders sat high across her back.

Small decisions accumulated into a person who might survive the climb.

Something struck Sandcat Two’s undercarriage.

The crawler shuddered beneath her. A loose connector bounced from the storage bay and dropped over the edge while the headlights swung through the darkness, briefly illuminating a pale body beneath the rover. Translucent skin stretched across a skull too broad to belong to a juvenile, and one enormous black eye turned toward her before the beam moved on.

An adult had reached the Sandcat.

The medication would need several minutes to take effect, assuming it helped at all, so Y/N kept working through the inventory. The flood lamp held sixty-three percent charge, four flares remained sealed, and the climbing line had once been rated for crawler recovery, though years of heat and dust had weakened its outer layer. One oxygen bottle still showed green. The second had ruptured against the compartment wall, leaving frost across the metal before the cold vanished into the fissure.

She found a roll of reflective insulation and wrapped it around the water bladders before clipping them securely to her harness. Losing them during the climb might be survivable since she still had caches above, but it would also be unforgivably stupid, and M6-117 punished stupidity more efficiently than injury.

The Sandcat shifted again. A bolt snapped somewhere beneath the rear frame, struck the stone once, and vanished into the dark as the crawler dropped several centimeters and gravel streamed from beneath it.

The creature below stopped moving.

Y/N felt its attention in the sudden silence. For several seconds, the only sounds inside her helmet were her breathing and the faint leak around the visor patch. Something exhaled beneath the shelf, sending a wet, carrion smell up through the fissure, thick enough to turn her stomach.

She picked up one of the flares. Chemical light could not reproduce direct sunlight, but heat and brightness had driven juveniles back before. Y/N clipped it where her good hand could reach.

“Plan A is the lamp,” she whispered. “Plan B is setting something on fire.”

There was no useful plan beyond that, but improvisation had carried her through sutures, water production, agriculture, and machinery that should have failed long before she found it. She had built a communication system from a dead lander while engineers on another world watched her move handwritten cards through the dirt. Compared with that, climbing out of a fissure full of bioraptors was only a different kind of impossible.

Y/N swallowed two tablets dry, reinforced the wrist splint, and tightened the ankle brace until the joint no longer shifted when she moved. A shadow crossed the ledge and crept over the toe of her boot.

The sunlight was moving.

“Right,” she murmured. “Deadline.”

She clipped the flood lamp to her chest, shifted the shotgun across her back, and pulled out the climbing line. One end went around Sandcat Two’s front axle. It was not an ideal anchor, but it was the largest object nearby that had not yet fallen into the chasm. After checking the knot twice, she gathered the free end and aimed for a stone projection above.

The first throw missed and dropped the rope beside her. The second looped over the rock but slipped free when she tested it. On the third attempt, the line caught behind a jagged shelf and held.

Claws moved across the stone below.

Y/N switched on the flood lamp and aimed it into the darkness. The beam cut through the suspended dust and found a pale body flattened against the lower wall, its black eyes reflecting silver. The creature recoiled with a shrill click and folded backward into a crack that seemed far too narrow to contain it.

More eyes opened around it.

Juveniles covered the walls in loose clusters, their limbs drawn close beneath translucent bodies. The earthquake had split through a nesting chamber that extended beyond the lamp’s reach. Pale sacs hung inside mineral pockets where heat rose from deeper in the crust. Some appeared to be eggs, while others looked like layers of molted skin. Bones had been packed into the gaps between them. Several belonged to the blind cave animals Y/N had seen near the blue decomposer colonies; others were longer and cleaner, stripped of everything a predator could use.

The juveniles shifted whenever a heavier call rolled through the chamber. Smaller bodies flattened against the walls and surrendered certain routes, revealing the hierarchy through movement alone.

A larger shape moved beneath Sandcat Two, lifting the rear of the crawler as it pressed upward from below. The adult appeared to be testing the obstruction, perhaps trying to drag the warm machine farther into the nest. Metal scraped across stone, and the axle shifted beneath Y/N’s rope.

If the Sandcat fell, it would take her anchor with it.

Y/N fed a shorter length of line through a split in the wall and clipped it to the main rope above the knot. The stone might not hold her full weight, but it could keep her from following the crawler immediately if the axle gave way. She had barely finished when the adult struck again and the rear frame slid several centimeters deeper over the chasm.

There was no more time.

She gripped the rope and began climbing. The first pull sent pain through her shoulder so violently that her vision dimmed, but she locked her good forearm around the line and pushed with her uninjured leg, using every projection in the wall as a step. The damaged ankle could brace lightly inside the splint but could not bear weight, and whenever it struck the rock unexpectedly, pain drove bile into the back of her throat.

A deeper call rolled through the fissure, strong enough to vibrate through the ledge beneath her hand. The juveniles flattened against the walls and became still.

Something larger was climbing after her.

The wall was not vertical, which helped in some places and made others worse. Her route became a broken sequence of narrow shelves, angled cracks, and overhangs that forced her sideways whenever the direct path disappeared. Sunlight poured into some sections in blinding columns, while others remained in deep shadow, where the flood lamp caught movement withdrawing into the rock.

The juveniles did not attack while the beam remained on them. They followed instead.

Y/N soon lost any reliable sense of time. The first few meters became a negotiation with her body: her good leg pushed, her good hand pulled, and the splinted wrist served only as a hook when there was no other hold. She tried to keep the injured ankle clear, but the fissure narrowed above the shelf and forced her against the wall. Stone pressed the brace into the swelling until every pulse seemed bright enough to see.

The flood lamp cast a hard circle across the rock. Beyond it, the darkness shifted even when nothing crossed the beam, while suspended dust revealed every current of air. The juveniles followed those currents toward her heat.

Before long, she began recognizing individual creatures. One had lost the tip of a feeler. Another carried a milky scar across part of one eye. A smaller juvenile could have fit inside Sandcat Two’s storage bay. They moved effortlessly across surfaces she could barely hold.

At a narrow shelf, Y/N found a half-eaten carcass wedged inside a crack. The animal had no eyes and too many thin forelimbs, its body split open above a pool of dark fluid while several blue decomposers pulsed along the exposed abdomen. Juveniles waited nearby, still enough to disappear against the stone.

The sight gave her an idea she disliked immediately.

She removed a small chemical sterilizer from her belt and sprayed it across the carcass. The decomposers recoiled, their blue light flaring beneath the chemical as a sharp, acidic smell filled the narrow space. Several juveniles below changed direction at once, drawn toward the sudden movement and unfamiliar odor.

Y/N climbed while they investigated.

Using living creatures as bait should have bothered her more, even creatures that had repeatedly escaped containment and eaten through her root beds. Ethics had become a collection of luxuries arranged according to their distance from immediate death. She promised herself she would feel guilty later.

Later was the reward.

The suit clock had failed during the fall, so pain divided time more reliably now. Pull. Brace. Test the next hold. Move the lamp. Do not stare too long into the dark.

The rope scraped across sharp stone twice. On the second pass, Y/N saw pale internal fibers beneath the damaged outer weave. She stopped on a narrow projection and shifted the line despite the pressure the movement placed on her wrist.

In the back of her mind, she heard Jimin reminding her that an anchor was only as reliable as the person too lazy to inspect it. He had said it during flight school after she mocked him for checking the same harness twice.

He had been irritatingly correct.

Y/N tied a short backup loop around a horn of stone and clipped it to her belt. Only after transferring part of her weight onto it did she continue, though the delay cost her sunlight. The bright band across the lower wall had already narrowed, and juveniles crept closer to its edge, appearing and disappearing behind the dust.

One extended a narrow wrist feeler into the light. The appendage found the scrape left by Y/N’s boot and followed it with delicate precision, pausing over every trace of blood or sweat that had passed through the damaged suit.

It was not searching blindly. It was reading her trail.

Y/N remembered the first bioraptor unfolding in the rain. Its wrist had opened, and the hidden spike crossed the space between them too quickly for her to understand what she was seeing. Before the eclipse, they had mistaken the appendages for claws.

The creatures could hunt through cracks, around corners, and beyond the reach of their jaws.

The feeler climbed toward her next handhold. Y/N drew her emergency knife and struck its tip against the stone. The blade met something harder than flesh, sending a vibration through the appendage before a shriek erupted from inside the wall. The feeler snapped away, leaving a narrow streak of dark fluid, and the juveniles scattered.

The adult did not.

Its call rolled upward, close enough to compress the air inside the fissure and vibrate through her injured ribs. Deep clicking gave way to a sequence of heavy impacts transmitted through the wall, each followed by a pause while the creature selected another hold. Adults did not scramble like juveniles. They climbed with the same care they used while hunting, placing their weight deliberately and allowing smaller bodies to clear the route ahead.

Y/N looked down once and found it three ledges below, caught in the flood lamp’s harsh beam. Its shoulders were too broad for the passage, forcing it to turn sideways while the rest of its body compressed around the rock with a flexibility that made its anatomy difficult to understand. The hammer-shaped skull angled toward her, and when the light struck one enormous black eye, smoke began rising from the exposed membrane.

The creature closed that eye and continued climbing with the other protected behind the wall.

It was learning to use the shadows.

Y/N unclipped the lamp from her chest and fixed it to the rope above her, creating a pool of light between them. The adult stopped below it, remaining safely in darkness while one wrist opened and released a pale feeler into the beam. The appendage uncoiled with slow precision until its black tip found the rope and began tracing upward.

It did not need to reach her. It only needed to damage the line.

Y/N pulled the shotgun from her back. There was no room to shoulder it properly, so she hooked one elbow around the rope, aimed downward with her good hand, and waited until the feeler crossed the center of the light.

She fired, and the blast filled the fissure hard enough to drive her injured shoulder into the wall. Shot tore through the appendage near its middle, spraying dark blue blood across the stone, where it smoked faintly beneath the lamp. The adult shrieked, and every juvenile in the nest answered at once.

The severed length remained wrapped around the rope, its black tip still moving as though it had not realized the rest of the creature was gone. Y/N knocked it loose with the shotgun barrel and watched the pale tissue twist independently as it fell through the beam and disappeared into the darkness. Below, the adult retreated by one body length, but it did not leave. It had only moved far enough away to reassess.

Three shells remained in the shotgun, and Y/N had no way of knowing when the next one would matter more. She slung the weapon across her back and resumed climbing before the creature decided what to do.

The feeler had extended far beyond the adult’s folded body, pale and nearly jointless, ending in the same black spike that had entered beneath her ribs. Her scar tightened as though the old wound remembered before she did.

“Not this time,” she whispered.

Claws moved below her and along both walls. At one point, the lamp caught two juveniles folded beneath an overhang above her, their eyes opening at the same moment. Y/N drove the beam into their faces. One fled immediately, but the other held its position and opened its narrow mouth, revealing several rows of fine teeth.

The rope jerked beneath her.

Her injured foot slipped, and Y/N dropped hard enough to tear a cry from her before the line caught. Her ribs struck the wall, leaving her hanging without breath, one hand locked around the rope while the lamp swung wildly. The juvenile launched from the overhang, and she caught the light with her splinted hand just in time to turn the beam toward it. The creature screamed in midair, twisted away, and struck the opposite wall before tumbling into the darkness.

The adult called again, closer now.

Y/N climbed faster. Pain stopped being sensation and became information. Her wrist still held. The ankle had not collapsed. Her lungs continued working. The rope burned through her gloves and her muscles shook, but the opening above widened with every pull.

Wind reached her first, hot and dry as it moved down from the surface carrying the mineral smell of the plain. The light became strong enough to sting through the fractured visor. She was almost there when her splinted hand failed.

Her fingers opened without warning. For one terrifying instant, Y/N watched the rope slide through them while the darkness below seemed to widen. Her elbow struck the rim before the rest of her body understood she was falling, and stone cut through the suit at the joint. A pressure warning flashed across the display too quickly to read.

Something pale rose through the dust beneath her, far too large to be one of the juveniles. The adult’s hammer-shaped head emerged at the lower edge of the sunlight, and the membranes covering its eyes tightened and began to smoke almost at once. It screamed but kept climbing, one wrist opening as the remaining feeler reached toward Y/N’s dangling boot.

She tore the flare from her harness with her teeth and struck the igniter against the rim. White light erupted between them. The adult recoiled, and Y/N threw herself forward, rolling across the edge before striking the ground hard enough to empty her lungs again.

The flare continued burning below the rim, flooding the dust with harsh white light. Nothing followed her into it.

Y/N lay several feet from the fissure beneath the full glare of the three suns, unable to move. Heat pressed through the suit, but her body shook as though she were freezing. Her teeth knocked together, and the muscles around her ribs tightened until every breath came in short, painful catches. The climb had demanded too much of her for shock to take hold. Now that solid ground was beneath her, her body began collecting every debt at once.

She rolled onto her side before nausea could fill the helmet. Her stomach clenched, but nothing came up; she had eaten too little for that. Dust rattled softly against the visor while she waited for the dizziness to ease.

The surface beyond the fissure no longer resembled the plain she knew. Cracks divided the ground in every direction, some narrow enough to step across and others opening into black gaps that might descend into the nest below. Broad sections of crust had risen or sunk, leaving ledges several meters high where the desert had once been level. In the distance, the remains of Colony 212 leaned at unfamiliar angles, and one of the old survey towers had folded against a ridge, its lattice frame twisted flat beneath the suns.

The ground moved again beneath Y/N’s hip. Several seconds later, a heavy report rolled in from somewhere beyond the horizon, followed by a cloud of dust rising into the white-gold sky. The fissure could widen, the Hab might finish collapsing, and any line she anchored could become useless with the next shift of the crust.

She lifted one edge of the patch over her fractured visor and tested the air leaking around it. The dust carried sulfur, hot stone, and dampness from somewhere deep below. Suit pressure remained above minimum, though the circulation fan hesitated every few breaths. She switched it to manual low power, and sweat began gathering beneath her collar almost immediately.

Her attention returned to the Hab. The western wall still stood only because she had reinforced it herself, dragging support beams from the settlement one at a time while cursing the original colony engineers for assuming the ground would remain stable simply because it had not moved during their survey period. That paranoia had saved one compartment. The rest of the structure sagged toward the fissure, its roofline broken and strips of solar fabric snapping in the wind. The camera mast was gone.

Prometheus had become her narrow bridge back to Earth. Its camera moved whenever the engineers wanted her attention, and their messages arrived in delayed fragments, but they arrived. Now the bridge had disappeared, and for the first time since contact had been restored, the empty space where the mast had stood made her feel alone in the old way.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she meant the panic or the people who could no longer hear her.

Her hand found the climbing line, and she wrapped it around her forearm before dragging herself into a sitting position. The ankle throbbed inside the splint and had already swollen further, while her wrist had gone numb beneath the wrap. Numbness was not reassuring, but for the moment, it was useful. Surviving the climb had not earned her rest. It had only changed the problem.

Sandcat Two still hung below.

Y/N rolled onto one elbow and looked back into the fissure. The rover remained wedged between two projections of stone, its headlights flickering through the dust. The climbing line still ran to the front axle, though the machine had shifted during her ascent. Its rear now hung lower, and every small movement sent gravel streaming into the darkness.

Several hundred meters away, smoke threaded through the surviving supports of the Hab. Half the eastern side had folded into the crack, and one solar wing had disappeared completely. Every part of her wanted to crawl toward it, but the Sandcat had to come first.

She hated the choice because the Hab had become more than shelter. It held the first green thing she had grown, the bunk where she had learned to sleep without waiting for claws against the walls, Shields’s archive, the messages she had recorded, and the place where she sat while Earth spoke to her through Prometheus. The Sandcat held none of that.

It held movement.

Without the rover, every cache might as well have been on another planet. The Hab could become a grave filled with excellent memories, while Sandcat Two could still carry her away from one. The logic was cruel because it was correct.

“Sorry,” Y/N whispered toward the broken shelter, unsure whether she meant the Hab, the plants, or herself.

Using the shotgun as a cane, she forced herself upright. The injured ankle refused her weight, so she locked the knee and leaned heavily against the weapon, moving toward the fissure in short, dragging steps. Each one sent pain through her hip, and by the time she reached the edge, sweat had soaked the suit lining.

The Sandcat’s recovery winch remained mounted beneath the front housing. Its control line had snapped during the fall, but the drum and motor might still work if she could reconnect them. Before touching anything, Y/N studied the frame.

Koah had taught her to do that years earlier, long before either of them knew the lesson would matter here. He had crouched beside a freight crawler on Aguerra Prime while she insisted the winch motor had enough rated power to pull a disabled vehicle. Koah had pointed toward the cracked mounting plate and explained that the strength of the motor meant nothing if it tore itself free from the chassis.

Force had to go somewhere, and machines did not care where people wanted it to go.

Y/N traced the Sandcat’s bent frame with her good hand, following the load path from the tow point through the chassis, suspension cage, and the rock supporting it. One bad attachment could pull the rover apart while its most useful sections disappeared into the dark.

The front tow ring had bent but remained seated in the main frame. The winch drum was still protected by the reinforced housing Bindi had installed after declaring that manufacturers designed rescue equipment for vehicles that never needed rescuing. The motor leads had been severed, however, and the manual clutch had jammed on impact.

Y/N wedged a broken length of antenna mast beneath the mechanism and used it as a pry bar. The clutch moved perhaps a millimeter. Every push sent pain through her wrist, and when she adjusted her grip and leaned her shoulder into the mast, pressure caught beneath her ribs hard enough to nearly black out.

The mechanism finally shifted with a hard metallic crack that sounded uncomfortably like a bone moving back into place.

“Force has to go somewhere,” she muttered.

She intended to make sure it went upward.

A seam had opened along the axle housing, and pulling from the wrong angle would tear the front assembly free. Y/N lowered the cable, routed it through the reinforced tow point rather than the wheel assembly, and used the antenna mast to turn the rover’s nose toward the least damaged section of wall. Every adjustment required her to crawl to the edge and lean over the fissure while the Sandcat shifted beneath her.

The larger creatures remained below the line of sunlight, but juveniles had gathered around the headlights. Pale bodies crossed the beams in quick bursts, and one struck the windscreen with a feeler, leaving a star-shaped crack in the remaining glass.

Y/N lit a flare. Harsh white light flooded the fissure, scattering the juveniles with shrill cries as the damaged windscreen reflected the glare deeper into the dark. Something much larger withdrew below with a scraping rush that shook dust from the walls.

The flare would last about six minutes. She wedged it above the edge and turned back to the anchors.

The nearest exterior junction box from the Hab had survived. Y/N crawled toward it, opened the casing with her emergency knife, and stripped two lengths of cable using her teeth and good hand. After dragging the wire back to the fissure, she drove three anchor stakes into the fractured soil, but the first bent before it had gone deep enough to matter.

That was how most useful things began on M6-117. The first compost bed had poisoned itself, the first water system had exploded, and her first antenna design had transmitted beautifully into a ridge of stone and nowhere else. Failure no longer meant the idea was wrong. It only meant the current version had revealed what it could not survive, and this one needed a wider angle.

Y/N crawled farther from the edge and studied the ground. Hairline fractures spread beneath a thin layer of dust, turning every apparently solid slab into a possible trap. If she drove the anchors too close to the rim, the load might shear off the entire section and send her back into the fissure.

Twenty meters away, part of the Hab foundation remained buried beneath reinforced concrete and native stone. The tow line would reach if she extended it with climbing rope, though the rope would stretch and heat under load. She doubled it, wrapped thermal material around every section that crossed exposed rock, and routed the line through a pulley to distribute the force.

The final arrangement looked less like engineering than desperation drawn across the ground. Before applying tension, Y/N photographed it with one of Sandcat Two’s surviving cameras. If the system failed and killed her, perhaps NOSA would someday recover an educational image.

The second stake held. She drove the third farther back, linked all three with tow cable, and redirected the winch line through a pulley salvaged from the collapsed antenna brace. Her first test dragged one stake halfway out of the ground.

Y/N drove it deeper and reinforced the base with support plating. The second pull held, so she connected the damaged leads. The winch motor coughed, whined, and began to turn.

Below her, Sandcat Two shifted as metal screamed against stone. The front axle rose several inches before dropping hard enough to shake the entire line, jerking one anchor sideways without pulling it free. Y/N cut the power before the cable could fail, adjusted the pulley angle, and tried again.

This time, the front wheels climbed toward the lip while the rear scraped up the wall. The motor strained loudly enough to rise above the wind, but halfway up, one of the mounting plates tore free and the rover slid backward.

Y/N threw herself across the manual brake lever. The load wrenched her splinted wrist and dragged her several feet through the dirt before the remaining anchors caught, leaving Sandcat Two suspended with its nose just below the rim.

She lay facedown beside the lever for several seconds, unable to move. Cracks had spread through the ground around the outer stake, and the same arrangement would not survive another attempt. Once she could breathe again, Y/N crawled to the remote-drive connection and linked it through the damaged cable. One front wheel responded when she powered it. The other spun uselessly, but a single working wheel might provide enough traction once the chassis reached the upper wall.

She reset the winch, tightened the line, and pressed the control. The motor pulled as the surviving wheel began to turn, breaking stone beneath the tire. The rover surged upward, its nose clearing the rim while Y/N kept the wheel powered and the winch dragged the remaining weight behind it. The rear axle caught against the wall, shuddered under the strain, and finally broke free.

Sandcat Two slammed onto the surface in a cloud of red dust. It rolled another half meter before the damaged suspension collapsed on one side, but its momentum continued carrying it toward the opposite edge of the fissure. Y/N lunged for the brake lead, caught the wire, and tore both conductors apart. The powered wheel stopped, leaving the rover tilted with its rear bumper less than a foot from the crack.

Below, the flare had burned down to a red core, and the wind drew a thin stream of chemical smoke from the fissure. The bioraptors had stopped clicking. Y/N imagined them gathered in the darkness, waiting for the light to disappear and gravity to return something edible.

They could wait.

She secured Sandcat Two to the exposed foundation before allowing herself to believe it was safe. Two independent lines, every knot checked, stones wedged beneath the damaged wheel. Only when nothing shifted did she collapse against the tire.

The rubber smelled burned, and one edge of the tread had split, but beneath the dust, the small white mark she had painted near the hub after the fifth repair remained visible. It still aligned. The rim had not shifted.

Y/N laughed against the tire, though the sound broke into a sob before she could tell where one ended and the other began. A damaged cable snapped nearby with a crack that echoed across the plain. She flinched, wrapped one arm around the hot wheel, and stayed there while her body shook.

“You ugly piece of shit,” she whispered. “I knew you’d make it.”

Sandcat Two answered with the soft ticking of stressed metal.

Y/N remained against the tire until the shaking eased enough for her to separate pain from immediate danger. The rover had survived the fissure, but survival had left it crooked. One side of the suspension had collapsed nearly to the ground, the windscreen was fractured, and a long crease ran through the front quarter panel where the chassis had struck stone. The cabin would not hold full pressure without repair, and when she tested the engine, it produced a metallic knock every third rotation.

It still started. The battery reserve remained low but stable, the primary power bus responded, and the rear storage compartment had stayed sealed through the fall, protecting most of the equipment she had packed before leaving the Hab. For the moment, that was enough.

She shut the engine down before the vibration could worsen the damaged suspension and crawled beneath the front housing. The rover rested unevenly on three wheels and one section of bent frame while fine dust sifted from the undercarriage onto her visor. The stabilizer arm had folded against the chassis, but the hydraulic line had been pinched rather than severed.

A proper repair would have required a jack, an alignment rig, a replacement bearing, and two functional hands. She had a bent section of antenna mast, tow cable, and an increasingly charitable definition of functional.

Y/N wedged the metal beneath the frame and raised the damaged side a centimeter at a time, sliding flat stones beneath the axle housing to carry some of the load. Once the pressure eased, she lashed the stabilizer arm against the chassis with doubled cable. The brace reduced the wheel’s steering range, but when she turned it by hand, it moved through almost half its arc before binding.

That would be enough for broad turns and open ground, provided she avoided anything requiring precision.

Bindi had once told her that a field repair was a lie told convincingly enough that machinery agreed to cooperate. Y/N tightened the final cable and said, “You’re completely fine.”

The Sandcat looked as though it resented being included in the deception.

She dragged herself upright and opened the rear storage compartment properly for the first time since the fall. Most of the loose equipment had shifted forward and wedged beneath the interior braces. One ration packet had burst, coating a tool case in gray protein powder, and a replacement filter had split along its housing. The primary diagnostic kit remained strapped to the sidewall, however, along with the compact soldering unit, cable splicer, two portable cells, and the hardened field terminal she normally used to communicate with Prometheus.

Y/N stopped when she saw it.

The terminal had been packed beneath the water bladders before the quake. Its casing was scratched and one corner had dented inward, but the status diode still pulsed faintly when she pressed the power control. The screen came alive beneath a web of hairline cracks.

LOCAL NETWORK: UNAVAILABLE

UPLINK: NO CARRIER

STORED OUTBOUND PACKETS: 3

LAST RELAY CONTACT: FAILED

She crouched beside the compartment and opened the connection history. The final successful handshake with Prometheus had occurred shortly before the first major tremor. Afterward, the Sandcat had tried to reach the lander automatically. Three packets remained in the outbound queue: a routine crop update, a diagnostic request, and the short personal message she had written for Jimin but had not yet decided whether to send.

None of them had gone anywhere.

The Hab antenna had served only as the local bridge. Prometheus carried the actual orbital transceiver, using the lander’s higher-gain array to reach the satellites passing overhead. If the lander still had power, the connection might be restored.

That depended on whether it had survived the earthquake.

Prometheus stood beyond the western ridge, too far from the Hab for Y/N to see from where she sat. The quake might have shifted the lander, buried its antenna, fractured the power feed, or swallowed the entire machine into another fissure. She would not know until she reached it, and first she needed the rover capable of carrying her there.

Y/N transferred the terminal, soldering kit, splicer, spare cable, diagnostic reader, and both portable cells into the cabin, then found the roll of reflective repair fabric beneath a collapsed crate and stretched it across the worst opening in the windscreen. It would not restore pressure, but it reduced the amount of dust entering the cabin and kept direct sunlight off the controls.

The seat frame had twisted during the fall. She forced it back far enough to sit without pressing fully against her ribs, then rerouted the damaged restraint through a cargo anchor. The result would have failed every safety inspection ever written, but most of those inspectors were several worlds away.

When she powered the rover again, the engine knocked once, caught, and settled into an uneven idle. Every warning light on the diagnostic panel appeared at once, including two connected to sensors that no longer existed, but Y/N listened beneath them. Coolant was moving, the front drive assembly engaged, and the surviving steering motor responded, though slowly. She eased the controls forward, and Sandcat Two rolled half a meter before stopping.

The rigid suspension brace held.

Before leaving, Y/N looked toward the Hab. Smoke drifted from the broken roof, and although the western wall remained upright beneath her reinforcements, half the structure had folded into the fissure. The communications mast lay scattered across the ground in sections, its dish split and its cable torn from the exterior junction box.

The plants were inside that ruin, along with her medical supplies, seed stock, water system, logs, and everything she had built after reaching Colony 212.

Prometheus could wait a little longer.

She guided Sandcat Two toward the Hab at walking speed. The damaged suspension objected to every change in terrain, pulling constantly toward the collapsed side and forcing her to hold the steering control against it. Each vibration traveled through the seat and into her ribs, and by the time she reached the western entrance, sweat had soaked the suit lining while her vision pulsed faintly with her heartbeat.

Y/N shut down the engine and remained still until the nausea passed. The breach where the airlock had been was too unstable to use, so she entered through the western maintenance opening, ducking beneath a twisted support while keeping her injured ankle clear of the broken floor.

The smell reached her first: burned insulation, wet soil, overheated circuitry, ruptured coolant, and the faint organic sweetness of crushed leaves. Direct sunlight poured through the missing roof and cut across the wreckage in hard white bands. The growing beds had overturned, leaving black islands of wet soil across the floor, while irrigation water gathered in the lowest sections before draining through cracks in the foundation. Torn root mesh hung from one support, and cave larvae moved openly through the mud, their bodies brightening around broken stems.

They were already dismantling what had died.

Y/N stood with one hand braced against the wall as the wreckage rearranged itself into memory: the first radish leaf turning toward the lamp, blue light beneath the compost chamber, and the nights she had sat cross-legged beside the beds while Shields’s recordings played from the terminal and the Hab smelled, for the first time, like wet earth instead of scorched metal.

She had measured her life through the garden. Germination. First true leaves. Stable roots. Reduced mold. New growth after pruning. Each change had proved that another span of time had passed and that she remained alive to witness it.

Now one of the radish leaves clung to the toe of her boot.

Y/N bent to remove it, but her ankle folded before she reached the floor and dropped her beside an overturned tray. Pain shot through her leg. Beneath her hand, the leaves were still warm from the grow lamp.

The plants had continued living after the ground began to move. For some small number of minutes, they had kept turning light into sugar while the shelter came apart around them, and the realization broke something loose inside her.

Y/N curled both hands into the spilled soil and cried until her damaged ribs made the effort impossible. Every ragged breath pulled through her side, and her forehead lowered almost to the ruined tray while dust settled across her shoulders and irrigation water continued tapping against the metal floor.

She had carried cave soil home while the wound beneath her ribs still bled, counted larvae one at a time, rebuilt pumps that failed whenever the temperature shifted, measured water by the milliliter while thirsty enough to dream of rain, and saved seed through heat, mold, and power losses. One movement beneath the crust had taken most of it apart.

Y/N remained beside the ruined beds until grief lost enough force for the room to separate into individual problems: water, live cable, open wall, surviving roots, terminal. Problems had edges. That made them easier to hold.

She cut power to the flooded section before touching anything else, then used a dry polymer brace to lift the sparking cable from the water and tie it against an overhead support. The irrigation reservoir had cracked near its base, so she pressed sealing foam into the opening until the leak weakened from a stream to a steady drip. Containers went beneath every surviving line, and she soaked up recoverable water with clean fabric. Anything too contaminated was marked for filtration rather than abandoned to the ground. Nothing left the Hab without first being asked whether it could still become useful.

The dead plants went into sealed compost containers. Y/N hated herself slightly for doing it, but dead leaves were nutrient material, and the surviving roots would need everything the larvae could return to the soil. One tray had fallen beneath a storage shelf and escaped the direct sunlight. Three sweet-potato crowns remained rooted inside it, their leaves bruised and one stem nearly torn through, but all three were alive. A sealed drawer nearby still held the remaining radish seed and two fungal cultures.

She carried each item into the western compartment before turning her attention to the terminal. The workstation had overturned during the collapse, leaving its main display shattered beneath a support, but the removable storage core remained locked inside the lower housing. Using the compact driver from her suit kit, Y/N opened the panel and pulled it free.

Her survival logs were there, along with Oslo’s recovered records, the growing-bed data, messages from her family, engineering notes, and personal recordings she had never transmitted. She sealed the drive inside her medical pouch, then searched the wreckage until she found the primary communication terminal beneath a fallen rack, still attached to a section of the Hab’s local relay cable. Its screen had cracked, and soil packed one of the cooling vents, but the internal status light remained green. Y/N worked it loose carefully.

The Hab’s antenna was beyond repair. The mast had broken in three places, the dish was split through its center, and the positioning motor had been dragged halfway into the fissure. Even if she rebuilt the mount, the array would never hold the alignment required to reach orbit.

It did not need to, provided Prometheus remained intact.

Y/N gathered every part of the old local network that might help her reconnect to the lander: the Hab terminal, the relay controller, two lengths of shielded cable, the frequency converter she had built months earlier, and the directional handshake module recovered from the Sandcat. She loaded them into the rover beside the portable cells and only then attended properly to herself.

Her ankle had swollen against the inside of the boot, with purple bruising spreading beneath the heel and along the outer joint. The wrist remained aligned inside the splint, though numbness had begun replacing the sharper pain, and broad bruises darkened her ribs where she had struck the fissure wall and the Sandcat. Y/N cleaned the abrasion across her shoulder and checked the scar beneath her lowest rib. The tissue around it had swollen and hardened after the fall, but her abdomen remained soft. There was no sudden distension, no obvious internal bleeding, and no wetness in her breathing. Nothing proved that anything inside had ruptured, which made good enough the closest thing she had to a diagnosis.

She swallowed another measured dose of pain suppressant, drank from the warm water bladder, and forced down enough protein paste to make her stomach object. Afterward, she moved the surviving plants beneath the one functioning grow lamp and programmed the western battery to maintain it at minimum output.

The Hab could only be sealed loosely. The western compartment still held partial pressure, but Y/N did not trust the damaged structure to survive another aftershock. She left the outer release on manual and kept her suit with her.

Before leaving, she stopped beside the terminal housing. There would be no message waiting now, no slight turn of Prometheus’s camera, no sentence arriving from a world where people knew she existed. Not until she repaired it.

Prometheus stood beyond the ridge. The drive should have taken less than twenty minutes, but with Sandcat Two pulling toward its damaged side and Y/N unable to tolerate more than a slow crawl, it took more than twice that. The terrain had changed around her. Hairline fractures split the old route, and one section of the plain had risen nearly a meter, exposing pale strata beneath the red crust. She detoured around every depression that might conceal a new void and kept the rover on darker, rockier ground whenever possible.

The lander appeared beyond the ridge in pieces: first the upper antenna mast, leaning several degrees from vertical, then the broad shoulders of the descent stage, followed by the collapsed service canopy and dark quake scars running along one landing strut.

Prometheus had not fallen.

The lander had shifted on its supports. One footpad had sunk into fractured ground, tilting the entire body, and the high-gain antenna no longer pointed toward its programmed acquisition arc. A section of the communications housing had torn open where the service canopy collapsed against it, and several outer panels lay scattered across the plain. The camera remained intact, though its lens faced the ground, inert.

Y/N climbed out with the toolkit clipped against her side. The first step nearly folded her injured ankle, so she leaned on the shotgun and crossed the distance in a slow three-point rhythm.

The external power indicator was dark. Prometheus’s internal reactor had been dead for decades, and everything she had restored depended on solar blankets and a battery bank assembled from colony equipment, Hunter-Gratzner cells, and Sandcat components. The quake had pulled two solar leads from the distribution box and snapped the support beneath the smallest array.

She began there.

One lead had torn cleanly at the connector and could be respliced. The second had ripped part of the terminal from the board, forcing Y/N to remove the damaged section, strip the cable with her knife, and reroute it through an unused service contact. The repair required both hands. Her splinted wrist could hold tension but could not turn properly, so she trapped the connector beneath her knee and worked with the good hand while sweat ran into her eyes.

The first portable cell supplied enough power to wake the lander’s diagnostic bus.

PROMETHEUS AUXILIARY SYSTEMS

FAULTS DETECTED: 31

PRIMARY TRANSMITTER: OFFLINE

ANTENNA POSITION: INVALID

LOCAL RECEIVER: DEGRADED

STORAGE ARRAY: AVAILABLE

The storage array mattered most. Prometheus could hold outgoing messages until an orbital relay entered range, which meant she did not need continuous contact. She only needed the lander to accept a packet, preserve it, and transmit when the sky offered a path.

The transmitter fault led back to the damaged exterior housing. Y/N removed the panel and found the waveguide coupler twisted loose from its mount. The main amplifier appeared intact inside the reinforced compartment, but one control line had separated, and the frequency-reference module showed no power. She had a compatible reference oscillator in the Hab relay controller, although compatible was generous. The Hab component operated within the same frequency family, but it expected different voltage and timing. Months earlier, she had written a crude conversion layer so the Sandcat could communicate with Prometheus through the colony network. The same bridge might work again if she rebuilt it without the Hab between them.

Y/N carried the terminal and relay components from the Sandcat and arranged them beneath the lander’s shadow, where the casings would not overheat immediately. The Hab controller became the timing source, the Sandcat terminal supplied the interface, and Prometheus provided the transmitter and storage. A portable cell powered the mismatched pieces until she could reconnect the solar bank.

The result looked absurd: three systems from three different eras resting in the dust, joined by cables, exposed boards, tape, and a length of Bindi’s blue cord that Y/N used to take the strain off the weakest connector.

The software proved easier than the hardware. The old handshake bridge still existed on the Sandcat terminal, so she changed the network address, disabled the missing Hab node, and instructed the rover to treat Prometheus as a damaged remote station rather than the final uplink.

The first test failed. The second reached the lander but returned corrupted timing data. Y/N adjusted the reference interval and tried again.

LOCAL LINK ESTABLISHED.

UPLINK UNAVAILABLE.

PACKET STORAGE ENABLED.

The antenna remained misaligned. Its primary positioning motor had survived, but the lander’s tilt left the normal acquisition limits several degrees short of the orbital corridor. Y/N could not level Prometheus, but she could widen the antenna’s mechanical range.

She climbed the service ladder one painful rung at a time. Her injured ankle could not push properly, leaving her good leg and arms to carry most of her weight, while her wrist screamed whenever she braced it against the rail. Halfway up, an aftershock passed through the ground and made Prometheus shudder beneath her. Y/N locked both arms around the ladder until the movement stopped.

From that height, the destruction around Colony 212 became visible beyond the ridge. The Hab looked like a broken silver shape beside the fissure, while Sandcat Two rested below her, bent but stubbornly upright.

Y/N continued climbing.

At the antenna base, she removed the mechanical stop from the azimuth assembly. The motor could now rotate beyond its original safety range, though doing so risked twisting the cable bundle around the mast. She marked the maximum safe position by hand, disabled the automatic return, and sent a test command.

The dish moved.

Slowly and reluctantly, it turned toward the section of sky where the next relay should cross. Prometheus searched for a carrier, but nothing appeared. The orbital window had not opened yet, which did not mean the repair had failed.

Y/N climbed down and connected the final solar lead. The array began feeding power into the battery bank. The current remained weak, but the charge indicator rose instead of falling.

She returned to the Sandcat and lowered herself behind the damaged console with the field terminal balanced across her thighs. Only then did she begin composing the report. The facts came first because facts survived broken transmissions better than grief.

MAJOR SEISMIC EVENT. HAB EASTERN SECTION COLLAPSED. LOCAL COMMUNICATION MAST DESTROYED. PROMETHEUS RELAY REPAIRED WITH TEMPORARY SANDCAT INTERFACE. SANDCAT TWO RECOVERED FROM FISSURE. SEVERE CHASSIS AND SUSPENSION DAMAGE. MOBILE AT REDUCED SPEED.

Her hands shook above the keyboard before she continued.

INJURIES: RIGHT ANKLE SEVERE. LEFT WRIST INJURED. POSSIBLE RIB FRACTURES. HEAD IMPACT. MOBILE WITH DIFFICULTY. PRIMARY GROWING SYSTEM LOST. MOST CROPS DESTROYED. SURVIVING STOCK: THREE SWEET-POTATO CROWNS, RADISH SEED, TWO FUNGAL CULTURES. LIMITED CAVE-LARVA POPULATION VIABLE.

She entered her remaining food, water, power, and medical supplies, along with the uncertain condition of the Hunter-Gratzner caches. Numbers steadied her. They did not require her to explain that the plants had still been warm.

At the bottom, she wrote:

I CAN REACH H-G CACHE AFTER SANDCAT AND ANKLE STABILIZE. DO NOT ASSUME TOTAL LOSS.

Y/N divided the report into three separate packets and instructed Prometheus to repeat each one during the next two orbital passes. The first packet entered the lander’s storage array.

QUEUED.

Y/N leaned back against the Sandcat seat. The repair had consumed what remained of her strength. Her injured ankle pulsed beneath the brace, and her wrist had swollen until the edge of the splint pressed visibly into the suit. She set the field terminal beside her, programmed an alert for any returned packet, and closed her eyes.

The alarm for the first orbital window woke her sometime later. Prometheus had acquired a weak carrier.

TRANSMISSION ACTIVE.

The signal meter rose, collapsed, and rose again. One packet cleared the queue. The second failed midway and reset automatically, while the third transmitted only its header before the relay moved beyond range.

Y/N watched until the carrier disappeared.

The packet reached Aguerra Prime in fragments. April Borne saw the Prometheus carrier appear and sat upright so quickly that her chair rolled backward into the console behind her.

“I have M6 traffic.”

Mateo was already crossing the operations floor before she finished speaking. The first packet had arrived without its opening lines, forcing April’s system to reconstruct the sequence from checksum data. Broken sections of the report assembled across the screen.

SANDCAT TWO RECOVERED—POSSIBLE RIB FRACTURES. HEAD IMPACT—MOST CROPS DESTROYED—

Mateo read it once. “Get the raw packet off the administrative network.”

April was already moving. She routed the transmission into the isolated mission archive before the automated system could distribute Y/N’s injury report to insurers, parliamentary oversight, and the corporate medical partners attached to M6-117. A warning appeared along the edge of her screen.

EMERGENCY TELEMETRY DISTRIBUTION REQUIRED.

Mateo closed it. “Run the checksum against the Prometheus storage header.”

“Already doing it.”

“Can we answer during the same pass?”

April checked the orbital clock. “Less than four minutes. We might get one short packet through if we transmit now.”

Mateo opened the return channel. There was no time to consult the full medical team, wait for legal approval, or involve any of the people who would insist the message pass through them before reaching the person who needed it. He began typing.

REPORT RECEIVED. DO NOT ATTEMPT H-G CACHE UNTIL ANKLE STABILIZED. PRIORITIZE PRESSURE, WATER, REST. LIMIT WEIGHT BEARING. CHECK TOE COLOR AND SENSATION. LOOSEN BRACE IF NUMBNESS INCREASES.

The reply was already nearing the packet limit, but he added one final line.

WE ARE WORKING THE FOOD PROBLEM.

April watched the relay window contract. “Twenty seconds.”

Mateo transmitted. The carrier disappeared before Prometheus acknowledged receipt, leaving them with no way to know whether the complete message had reached the surface.

Y/N returned to the Hab before the reply arrived. The drive back took longer because the pain suppressant had begun to wear off, and by the time she parked Sandcat Two beside the western wall, every vibration had settled deep into her ribs and ankle. She connected the rover’s reserve power to the surviving compartment, then carried the field terminal inside with both hands.

The western pressure seal held badly but consistently. One scrubber still worked, and the grow lamp flickered above the three surviving sweet-potato crowns while faint blue light moved beneath the recovering compost. Y/N warmed half a ration in the thermal cup and ate beside the plants. The smallest stem sagged beneath its own weight, so she braced it with a short length of irrigation tubing and tied it loosely with Bindi’s blue cord.

“You’re not dying because I ran out of tape,” she told it.

Afterward, she elevated her ankle on a tool crate and opened Shields’s data drive. An old episode of Star Trek resumed halfway through a discussion about an impossible rescue.

Y/N stared at the screen. “You people have no idea.”

She did not remember falling asleep. The chime of the field terminal pulled her awake so abruptly that she reached for the shotgun before she understood what she was hearing. Pain followed the movement a second later, tearing through her ribs and ankle. She caught herself against the floor, waited for the worst of it to pass, and dragged the terminal closer.

A packet waited in the queue. Y/N read while the rest of the message reconstructed itself through the static. The final lines arrived several seconds later, and she lowered herself fully to the floor.

The message could not reset her ankle, restore the growing beds, or undo the fissure. It had crossed the distance between worlds only to tell her that somewhere, people had seen what had happened and were still awake because she was hurt.

Her face tightened. She covered her mouth with her wrapped hand and cried quietly beside the surviving plants. When she could breathe again without shaking, she typed:

COPY. PRESSURE STABLE ENOUGH. RESTING. THANK YOU.

The reply entered Prometheus’s outbound queue.

Mateo carried the report downstairs.

For days, he had imagined the first catastrophe that might follow restored contact. Fear changed shape once the mind grew accustomed to it, replacing one possibility with another before relief could settle. He had prepared himself for a failed water system, a fire, a medical emergency, perhaps another predator incursion, but he had never imagined the planet opening beneath the home she had built.

For one shameful moment, relief came first. Y/N had answered. She was alive, conscious, and clearheaded enough to inventory what remained, estimate the damage, and warn them not to assume a total loss. By the time Mateo reached the section describing her injuries and the destruction of the crops, that relief had hardened into something heavier.

He forwarded the report to Yoongi with a single sentence.

We need the room now.

The secure conference room beneath operations had been designed for briefings, not prolonged occupation. After weeks of emergency meetings, the air smelled of burned coffee, recycled ventilation, and too many people who had stopped sleeping properly. Mateo stood at the head of the steel table with Y/N’s report open before him. Yoongi sat to his right, still wearing the jacket he had arrived in, while Alice Sung held a tablet in one hand, her composure betrayed only by the tightness around her mouth. At the opposite end, Creed Summers studied the raw telemetry recovered from Prometheus.

Although the room had been disconnected from the ordinary government network, a narrow green light above the door showed that executive security still retained access. Yoongi glanced toward it as he sat down.

“Ward?”” Mateo asked.

Yoongi shook his head, leaving either the internal security directorate or one of the private oversight firms contracted to monitor senior officials handling commercially sensitive information.

Alice placed her tablet facedown. “Can they hear us?”

“Assume they can,” Yoongi said.

Mateo brought up the medical reconstruction. Y/N’s suit telemetry had recorded the acceleration of her fall but nothing that happened after she disappeared beneath the surface, so he had built the model from her description, the limits of movement she reported, and everything she had chosen not to mention.

“She climbed out with one functional hand,” Mateo said. “Recovered the crawler, stabilized the western compartment, repaired Prometheus, and transmitted.”

Yoongi studied the orbital image of the fissure. “How long was she down there?”

“Forty minutes at minimum. Dust obscured the first pass, so it may have been several hours.”

Alice moved through the report. “She doesn’t mention the predators.”

Creed examined the missing telemetry. “They may not have been close.”

“Or she had worse things to report,” Mateo said.

Alice enlarged the crawler data. “She recovered the Sandcat herself?”

“The surface feed cut during the quake. It was below the fissure when the signal failed and aboveground by the next clear pass.”

Creed looked toward the injury model. “That ankle won’t bear much weight.”

Mateo replaced the display with a reconstruction of the Hab, assembled from orbital imagery and fragments of surviving telemetry. One side sagged into the fractured ground while the other remained upright beneath a web of emergency patches.

“The eastern support frame is gone, and environmental control is below thirty percent. The western compartment can hold pressure as long as the patch remains sealed, but the greenhouse is finished.”

“How much growth survived?” Yoongi asked.

“Less than ten percent. She still has seed stock, but no reliable lighting and no safe way to move enough cave soil.”

Alice opened the food inventory. “What about the caches?”

“Better than expected. She divided supplies between the Hunter-Gratzner, the old settlement, and two sites near the Hab.” Mateo enlarged the figures. “At minimum medical intake, she has roughly two hundred twelve sols.”

Creed frowned. “Medical minimum or survival minimum?”

“Medical. She can stretch it further, but the faster she loses muscle, the harder it becomes to reach the caches or maintain the shelter.”

A red line appeared across the projection. “Functional food exhaustion falls near Sol three-forty-seven,” Mateo continued. “Beyond that, the model becomes unreliable. She may survive another thirty or forty sols under ideal conditions, but I would not build a rescue schedule around them.”

“Infection?” Alice asked.

“Could shorten the estimate. So could another collapse.”

Yoongi’s tablet vibrated against the steel table. He ignored it, but a second alert followed, then a third.

Mateo glanced toward the screen. “Treasury?”

“Among others.”

“You sent them the survival curve?”

“The system did.”

Yoongi opened the first response and read it without expression. When Alice asked what it said, he lowered the tablet slightly. “They want evidence that the expenditure would produce a strategic return.”

The second message came from Parliamentary Appropriations, asking whether any proprietary agricultural methods had survived the destruction of the greenhouse. Coalition Strategy wanted updated polling on how much of the public blamed the government for M6-117.

Creed looked toward the reconstruction of the broken Hab suspended above the table. “They’re polling an earthquake.”

“They’re polling us,” Yoongi said.

Mateo gave a humorless laugh. “She crawls out of a fissure, and they want to know whether it costs them votes.”

“They asked about the commercial loss first,” Yoongi replied as he closed the messages.

No one answered. The people controlling the money had not asked whether Y/N was frightened, whether she could sleep inside the damaged Hab, or whether her ankle would heal without proper imaging. They wanted to know what her continued survival could be made to produce.

Mateo looked at Yoongi. “You’ll answer them.”

“I need the appropriation.”

Alice expanded the orbital infrastructure around M6-117. Most of the icons were gray. The original survey satellites had decayed years earlier, and the few relays still in orbit carried little correction fuel and no equipment capable of atmospheric delivery.

“We can redirect Helios,” she said. “It has enough power to serve as a stronger relay.”

Creed checked the orbit. “The inclination is wrong. Changing planes would nearly empty the tanks.”

“How much coverage would it give us?”

“Intermittent.”

“That’s still coverage.”

“It would leave the equatorial storm network blind.”

Yoongi looked at the map. “Move it.”

Alice entered the command, but a warning opened before she could complete it.

HELION CLIMATE SYSTEMS: SERVICE INTERRUPTION PENALTY APPLIES.

The platform belonged to the government, but its observations had been leased to shipping insurers, agricultural exchanges, and three private settlement authorities. Redirecting it would expose NOSA to claims large enough to erase an entire research program.

Alice read the figure twice. “The penalty comes out of the Nexus reserve, and that account is already below the parliamentary floor.”

“I know.”

Yoongi entered his executive key, signed the acknowledgment, and repeated, “Move it.”

They considered ordering Y/N to abandon the Hab, but none of the alternatives improved her chances. The Hunter-Gratzner contained supplies but offered no stable pressure and no viable growing space, while the underground structures at Colony 212 sat dangerously close to known cave entrances. Remaining in the western compartment was dangerous, but relocating while injured was dangerous in another way. Every option had become a comparison between failures.

“What does she need first?” Yoongi asked.

“Food,” Mateo said. “Then medical support, power, and structural material. If she loses mobility, the caches stop mattering.”

Alice added a powered ankle brace to the manifest. Creed requested a compact pressure membrane, while Mateo added antibiotics, anti-inflammatory medication, electrolyte solution, and a portable scanner. The list expanded faster than the available mass.

Medical wanted imaging equipment, sterile supplies, a trauma kit, and enough medication to cover complications they could not predict. Habitat wanted pressure membrane, structural braces, sealant, and air processing. Nutrition wanted calories, protein, oil, vitamins, fiber, and packaging capable of surviving atmospheric entry and surface heat. Mobility requested the brace and a hauling system, while Communications wanted a relay, an antenna, a camera, and redundant power.

By the time every division had finished, the first complete manifest exceeded the projected payload by three hundred twelve kilograms.

Alice placed the list on the wall. “We need three hundred off.”

No one offered anything from their own division, so Mateo began. He removed the imaging unit and replaced it with a smaller ultrasound probe compatible with Y/N’s console. Habitat reduced the structural braces from six to four and redesigned the pressure membrane so part of the capsule itself could become the replacement wall. Nutrition packed oil into sealed cells around the guidance unit, while Communications abandoned the second camera and accepted a narrower transmission band.

The changes removed one hundred eighty kilograms.

Creed studied the launch estimate. “We can push the booster.”

“Past certification?” Alice asked.

“Past mission limits, not demonstrated test limits.”

“That reduces the launch margin.”

“It preserves the payload.”

The argument began circling until Yoongi cut through it. “Remove another sixty kilograms and push the booster for the rest.”

Alice examined the revised figures. “That leaves almost nothing for error.”

“We don’t have anything for error now.”

Several values shifted from amber to red. Yoongi studied the manifest before saying, “Every item needs a second use. Packaging becomes structure. Containers become storage. Battery housings become braces. Nothing goes to her unless she can still use it after the capsule lands.”

Mateo wrote the instruction across the top of the requirements sheet.

The deadline looked small on the screen. Numbers always did. The line ending at Sol three-forty-seven occupied less than half the display, but it did not show meals divided into thirds, muscle consumed for energy, or the calculation required to decide whether a mouthful eaten now mattered more than the strength it might preserve later. It did not show an injured woman crawling through a ruined greenhouse to save three plants that could not mature quickly enough to feed her.

Yoongi had seen starvation models before, but they belonged to training simulations and contingency exercises in which an instructor eventually paused the scenario and returned the crew to safety. This one would continue whether they watched it or not.

“How close is her estimate?” he asked.

Mateo looked down at the report. “Within six sols of ours.”

He replaced the Hab reconstruction with a metabolic projection. Clean downward curves appeared beside photographs of shattered growing trays. “She has already lost muscle. Reducing her intake preserves food, but it also makes every repair and cache run harder. The longer she stretches the supplies, the less physically capable she becomes of reaching them.”

Alice opened the power forecast. “Could she move the surviving plants into the Hunter-Gratzner?”

“The wreck’s environmental systems are too unstable.”

“So the Hab stays.”

“As long as the ground does,” Creed said.

The silence held only briefly before he enlarged the orbital inventory. “Is there anything already in-system that we can drop?”

“Nothing with sufficient guidance,” Alice replied. “A blind deployment could land anywhere between the ocean basin and the northern caves. She could never travel that far.”

Yoongi tightened his hands around the edge of the table. “What about the Nexus hardware?”

“Wrong trajectory and no entry shielding.”

“Can it be adapted?”

“Not quickly enough.”

New Oslo possessed launch vehicles, fabrication bays, deep-space guidance, and enough expertise to move machines between worlds, but none of it had been organized for urgency. Spaceflight survived by refusing haste. Every duplicated inspection, delayed launch, and engineer permitted to stop a countdown existed because physics did not care why anyone was in a hurry.

Y/N’s food supply did not care either.

“What does the standard architecture give us?” Yoongi asked.

“Seven hundred thirty days under the current alignment,” Creed said.

“Then it’s useless. Find something else.”

Mateo looked at him. “With what funding?”

“Emergency reserve.”

“Treasury denied the threshold.”

Yoongi expanded the government’s liability model beside the survival projection. Pending Hunter-Gratzner claims, treaty penalties, insurance exposure, the value of Y/N’s transmitted research, public approval following proof of life, and the coalition’s projected losses if she died while communicating with NOSA gathered beside the image of her ruined shelter.

Mateo watched the commercial projections build around her medical data. “She’ll hate this.”

“She can hate it when she gets home.”

The answer ended the argument more effectively than anything longer could have. Mateo turned the liability model toward himself and asked what polling margin Yoongi needed. Yoongi gave him the number.

The funding request reached the executive office before the technical meeting ended. Yoongi’s tablet began vibrating in short intervals, each alert arriving beneath a different seal: Treasury, Parliamentary Appropriations, the Prime Minister’s policy office, and the Coalition Electoral Council, which officially held no authority over NOSA and nevertheless seemed to know the contents of every emergency request before half his own directors did.

He silenced the tablet.

“They want the estimate?” Alice asked.

“They want a number they can defend.”

“Give them the survival curve,” Creed said.

Yoongi looked toward the red line. “They can’t spend that.”

Alice understood. “It’s a liability. They’ll go for it.”

NOSA had already compensated the Hunter-Gratzner families through sealed agreements negotiated while Y/N was presumed dead, the colonial records remained classified, and the agency could still claim that no rescue had been possible. A living survivor changed the legal structure. Every transmission became new evidence, and every image of the ruined Hab documented the duration of the government’s failure in real time.

Mateo looked toward Yoongi. “How many votes?”

“For a rescue? None.”

“The Prime Minister supports it,” Alice said.

Yoongi opened the first message. “Ward can’t authorize the reserve without the coalition, and Treasury won’t release it unless Parliament classifies the mission as strategically necessary.”

Creed’s expression hardened.

Another message arrived from the Coalition Electoral Council. It discussed northern district polling, public confidence in exploration, and the percentage of undecided voters who believed the government had concealed the truth about M6-117. An attachment estimated the commercial value of the biological and geological data Y/N had transmitted.

Alice read the figures. “They already valued the organisms?”

“The licensing rights.”

Above the table, the projection showed the ruined Hab and the narrow western compartment where Y/N was trying to remain alive. Beneath it, the electoral report described her as a high-recognition public asset with strong cross-party sympathy.

Yoongi closed the file. Telling Parliament that she was alive, injured, and owed a rescue would earn sympathetic statements and requests for further study. Telling them that abandoning her could reopen billions in liability, surrender valuable patents, and cost the coalition an election might build a probe.

“What is the fastest launch window?” he asked.

Alice opened the fabrication schedule. “A normal long-range probe takes six months before certification.”

“I asked for the fastest.”

She studied the schedule. “Forty-seven days, maybe. Existing booster, continuous fabrication, reduced design.”

Yoongi stood. “Get Propulsion, Guidance, Engineering, Materials, and SatCon into main operations. I want a complete failure tree by the end of the day. Food, medicine, shelter, power, and communications. Nothing else.”

His tablet vibrated again, this time beneath Ward’s personal seal.

I CAN HOLD THE VOTE UNTIL MORNING. I CAN’T WIN IT WITHOUT CONTRACTS.

Yoongi read the message and locked the screen, though Mateo had already seen enough.

“How many?” Mateo asked.

“He didn’t say.”

“He wants you to carve up the probe.”

“He wants enough votes to fund it.”

Mateo looked toward the payload list. The green light above the door remained steady, a quiet reminder that someone outside the room could still be listening.

“And if you refuse?” Mateo asked.

“They replace me.” Yoongi turned his attention back to the manifest. “No contract gets onto that vehicle unless it produces something she needs.”

“They’ll push.”

“I know.”

The exchange ended there. Neither man needed to explain what happened after the pushing stopped being political.

Creed studied the transit estimate. “Even if we launch in forty-seven days, the standard route still misses the window.”

“Find another route,” Yoongi said.

“There may not be one.”

Ward called several minutes later. Yoongi took the conversation at the far end of the room while the others remained gathered around the projection. Elias Ward appeared without flags, advisers, or the careful lighting used for public addresses. His tie hung loose, and one sleeve had been rolled above the wrist.

“I saw the report,” he said.

“Then you know what I’m asking for.”

“Without conditions, it dies in committee.”

Yoongi’s jaw tightened. “What conditions?”

“Domestic booster, regional fabrication, and an agricultural licensing review.”

“Her medical data stays out.”

“Helix asked for it.”

“No.”

Ward exhaled and glanced toward something beyond the camera frame. “Then give them access to the organisms.”

“We can work with them on Nexus III and negotiate something limited. I can authorize a collection team to M6 within the next five years.”

“I can work with that,” Ward said. “Two ministers also want assembly contracts in their districts, and Communications wants exclusive use of the first verified video.”

“No campaign use.”

Ward dragged a hand across his mouth. “I can hold the vote until morning, but I can’t manufacture a majority.”

Yoongi looked past him toward the projection of Y/N’s ruined Hab. “I’ll give you contracts. You don’t get her.”

Ward nodded once. “Send me the structure within the hour.”

The call ended without either man saying goodbye. Yoongi returned to the table and began issuing instructions before anyone could ask what Ward had demanded.

“Forty-seven days under emergency procurement. Alice, separate every scientific right from her personal records before Legal drafts the language. Creed, regional subcontractors can touch individual components, but they go nowhere near integration.”

“And the public feed?” Mateo asked.

“Not yet.” Yoongi turned toward him. “Call Marco.”

“He’ll tell us six months.”

“Tell him he has forty-seven days.”

Alice was already on her feet. “I’ll do it.”

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marco answered on the second ring. He had slept for ninety-three minutes beneath his desk after spending the previous cycle reviewing Prometheus’s thermal damage. The office lights remained dim, and the collar of yesterday’s shirt had dried stiff against his neck.

Seeing Alice on the secure channel stripped away whatever sleep remained. She explained the quake, the destruction of the crops, and the food deadline while he opened Y/N’s report in a second window.

“How long?” he asked when she finished.

“Two hundred twelve sols before functional exhaustion.”

“And launch?”

“Forty-seven days.”

Marco leaned back. “A complete redesign can’t be built, tested, and certified in forty-seven days.”

“Then don’t build a complete redesign.”

“That isn’t how this works.” He looked away from the screen, and Alice recognized the expression. He had already begun counting personnel, components, fabrication bays, and favors.

“Everything else stops,” he said. “We pull teams from active missions, overlap testing with construction, and accept that redundancy disappears. Even then, the current route arrives too late.”

“Trajectory is working on that.”

“Trajectory can’t change the alignment.”

“Dean Marblemaw thinks it might.”

Marco rubbed both hands over his face. “Give me twelve hours.”

“You have six.”

“Ten, Alice.”

“Fine.”

“Send me everything.”

The call ended, and Alice opened the confidential personnel directory. Too many of the specialists Marco needed were assigned elsewhere or remained under mandatory rest orders after the Prometheus recovery, but she reassigned them anyway.

One name made Alice pause: Elena Carr, materials lead, three months from retirement. She had designed the thermal shell for the first Nexus return capsule and once described emergency schedules as the shortest possible route from ambition to shrapnel.

Alice called her.

Elena answered from a garden beneath artificial rain, and one look at Alice’s face was enough.

“How long?”

“Forty-seven days.”

“For what?”

“A survival probe. Doctor lost the greenhouse.”

Elena looked away as the rain fell behind her in thin silver lines, catching against the leaves. “Send me the shell requirements.”

The connection ended before Alice could answer. She opened the next secure line and continued through the list—Propulsion, Guidance, Fabrication, SatCon, the orbital yard—until the project existed in enough inboxes, terminals, and hurried conversations that stopping it would require more effort than allowing it to continue.

At JPL, Marco received the technical packet first. The procurement restrictions arrived eleven seconds later, and his stomach dropped as he read them.

Propulsion work had to be divided among three coalition districts. Orison Aeronautics would provide the structural housing even though JPL’s existing supplier had already certified a compatible frame. Guidance subcontracting had been reserved for Varga Systems, while a requirement labeled domestic industrial confidence prohibited the foreign booster that could have shortened integration by nearly two weeks.

Marco called Alice back. “Tell me this attachment is wrong.”

“It isn’t.”

“Orison’s coupling has never been tested with our frame, and Varga requires a conversion shell. This adds weeks to the schedule.”

“The alternative is no vehicle.”

That was the trap. Reject the conditions, and Y/N received nothing. Accept them, and the engineers inherited risks created by people who would never stand near the launchpad.

“When it breaks, they’ll blame us,” Marco said. “Does Gomez know?”

“He was in the room.”

By then, the mission floor around him had gone quiet. Engineers watched from behind their monitors, and two interns stood near the materials station with tablets pressed against their chests, no longer pretending they were not listening.

Marco rose. “We have forty-seven days to build and launch a survival payload. The person receiving it is injured, and her food system is gone. Every day we lose comes out of what she has left.”

He picked up a marker and wrote four words across the nearest board.

FOOD. MEDICAL. POWER. SHELTER.

“Team One takes structure and integration. Team Two takes fabrication and logistics. Propulsion works directly with Guidance, and Communications coordinates with SatCon and Prometheus. If a component exists anywhere in the system and is not supporting another life-critical mission, I want it located by midnight.”

A propulsion engineer raised one hand. “Certification?”

“Parallel testing.”

“We’ve never done that on a vehicle like this.”

“I know.”

The engineer lowered his hand, but the first disagreement began before Marco finished assigning teams. Propulsion wanted a booster chosen immediately so Structures could design around known acceleration and vibration loads. Structures refused to commit before the payload mass had been fixed. Guidance needed departure energy before it could validate a route Dean had not yet found, while Logistics wanted dimensions for components no one had finished designing.

Marco let the noise build for less than a minute before raising his voice over it. “Stop waiting for final numbers and design the interfaces. I want a frame that can accept three booster configurations, a mass range for Guidance, and multiple load cases for Structures.”

A fabrication lead looked toward the schedule. “That guarantees rework.”

“Yes.”

“A lot of it.”

“We can redo the work. We cannot get the day back.”

The room began moving again.

Before the end of the hour, Marco created a red team whose only purpose was to find reasons the vehicle would fail. Their reports would bypass management and appear directly on his terminal, and anyone who identified a mission-killing flaw had to sign the report and would be given time to defend it. Urgency tended to silence caution first. Marco intended to make caution impossible to ignore.

By the end of the first shift, the red team had identified twenty-three single-point failures. Thermal expansion could jam the payload hatch. Heat from the stellar pass might fuse the medical-case latches. A food compartment could deform into the antenna feed during impact, and the adhesive selected for the shelter membrane released toxic vapor above its rated temperature. Every problem went onto the board, and none was removed simply because solving it would be inconvenient.

Marco walked through fabrication alone shortly after midnight. Empty sections of frame hung from overhead supports while composite printers laid down material in thin, glowing bands. Technicians slept against tool cabinets during mandatory twenty-minute rests, their alarms set to wake them before their bodies settled too deeply.

The probe did not yet exist, but its absence occupied the entire building.

No one gave speeches. An avionics lead canceled leave without being asked, Materials contacted the orbital shipyard for every spool of high-temperature composite not already assigned to life-support hardware, and Procurement invoked emergency authority only to discover that emergency authority still required seventeen signatures. Alice obtained all seventeen in twenty-three minutes by informing each official that the forms would be treated as approved unless they preferred to explain the delay directly to Yoongi.

Marco divided the design according to what had to survive the full transit and what only needed to remain usable after impact. Food could tolerate forces electronics could not. Medication required temperature control but occupied little volume. The shelter membrane could wrap delicate components and serve as padding, while batteries had to remain isolated from anything sharp enough to puncture them.

The first model resembled a conventional spacecraft, complete with landing legs. Marco removed them during the third mass review.

The capsule would strike M6-117 beneath a deployable drag system and a crushable base. The change saved propellant and hardware, though it widened the landing ellipse enough for Guidance to object.

“We need the legs for stability after touchdown,” one engineer said.

“What do they weigh?” Marco asked.

“Thirty-two kilograms with the deployment hardware.”

“Remove them. Restrain the crates for a tumble.”

A layered impact skirt replaced the landing legs, built from composite honeycomb designed to collapse in sequence around the central payload. Every internal crate received independent restraints and locator tags. When a junior engineer suggested inflatable airbags, the first design proved too heavy, but the idea returned after someone realized the bladders could serve as water storage once the capsule reached the surface.

From that point on, nothing flew for only one reason.

The heat shield would become shelter paneling, the parachute fabric would become insulation, and the guidance batteries would power the Hab. The external antenna mast could be separated into structural poles, while the capsule shell itself was scored into sections Y/N could detach with one functional hand and drag into place.

Marco kept imagining her opening the probe alone—injured, exhausted, staring through a cracked visor with no one beside her to explain an unlabeled release or force open a stubborn latch. He ordered every removable panel painted brightly enough to remain visible beneath red dust and every release mechanism marked with lettering large enough to read through damaged glass. The machine was not merely going to her. It had to remain useful after it arrived.

The conventional design included service panels, standard connectors, and a payload bay arranged for future maintenance, but Marco removed most of them because no one would ever service the probe after launch. Instead, he reorganized the interior into concentric layers around the guidance core, each chosen to absorb heat, radiation, or impact before the next could fail. Dense protein bricks filled the spaces around the electronics, nutrient bags cushioned the medical case, and the shelter membrane wrapped the inner payload before later unfolding into a pressure enclosure. Water filters occupied the channels between battery cells where thermal regulation would otherwise have required empty space.

A systems engineer warned that an impact could rupture one of the cells and contaminate the food.

“Add isolation film,” Marco said.

“That adds mass.”

“Change the cell geometry.”

“That also adds mass.”

Marco studied the model. “Remove the decorative fairing.”

“And the second beacon antenna?”

“Remove it.”

The projected mass fell again. Every gram acquired an argument.

At three in the morning, a nutrition specialist arrived with twelve revised food plans and the fury of someone who had just discovered Engineering intended to send months of protein paste with almost no fiber. She replaced part of the payload with compressed fungal meal, sealed oil packets, vitamin concentrate, and heat-stable fiber.

“The packaging is too heavy,” Marco said.

“She is injured, dehydrated, and living on ration paste. Do you want to add a bowel obstruction?”

Marco looked at the revised mass. “How much can you remove?”

She did not answer, and the fiber stayed.

At five, the medical team demonstrated that Y/N could not open the proposed injector case while wearing a wrist splint. Marco tried the latch himself and needed both hands.

“Redesign every one of them.”

By seven, he realized they had worked through the night without anyone mentioning it. Forty-seven days had already become forty-six, and the probe still resembled a scaffold assembled from compromises. By midnight, however, it had begun to look more like a weapon aimed at a planet.

Marco preferred the second description. Weapons admitted why they existed.

The JPL floor reorganized itself around Y/N’s survival. A lunar-mapping demonstrator lost its propulsion team, two materials specialists were pulled from a classified atmospheric project without being told why, and storage crews opened inventories untouched for years. Someone even located three radiation-hardened processors inside a museum display and began the paperwork required to retrieve them from history.

The technical problems occupied only half the schedule. Procurement delivered the rest.

The emergency appropriation passed by six votes and arrived with twenty-three pages of conditions attached. The primary booster had to come from Orison Aeronautics because its assembly plant occupied two coalition districts. Guidance subcontracting went to Varga Systems after its chairman underwrote the governing party’s orbital campaign, while three cargo housings had to be fabricated on Aguerra Prime despite a certified supplier already operating beside JPL.

The mission had not been approved as one machine. It had been approved as a distribution of favors.

Marco stood beneath the component manifest and read it twice before turning toward the procurement liaison. “The Orison coupling has never flown with this frame.”

“It meets the written load requirement.”

“That’s not what I said. It’s never flown with this frame.”

“The appropriation requires domestic integration.”

“The certified booster is four hundred meters away.”

“It’s not eligible.”

“Why?”

The liaison hesitated before answering. “Its manufacturer has no parliamentary sponsor.”

Across the room, engineers pretended not to listen while hearing every word. Marco looked toward the unfinished frame. Y/N’s food projection had been fixed above the assembly floor, and every day they lost moved the red line closer.

“How much vibration testing do we get?”

“Two abbreviated runs.”

“We need full duration.”

“There isn’t time,” the liaison lowered his voice. “Do you want the funded vehicle or the unfunded one?”

Marco stared at him, then signed the integration variance. For the rest of the day, the authorization remained open on his tablet like a small confession.

He rejected the first payload layout because it devoted eleven kilograms to redundant scientific sensors. The second failed because the shelter components required tools Y/N could not operate with an injured wrist, while the third achieved excellent caloric density by omitting a replacement scrubber.

“Stop designing for a healthy crew,” he told them. “This is for one injured person working alone. Every latch opens one-handed. Every instruction has to make sense with a concussion, and nothing weighs more than she can drag.”

A young structures engineer glanced toward the board. “What if her wrist heals before it arrives?”

“Then she gets an easy latch.”

Far above the operations floor, in an office lit by orbital models, Dean Marblemaw slept half off a loveseat with one leg hanging over the arm. He had chosen the room because it had no windows. Windows encouraged the mistaken belief that day and night should influence work, an idea orbital mechanics did not share. The loveseat had been installed for visiting administrators and was far too small for him, which Dean considered a design failure and continued sleeping on it out of spite.

His reputation rested on trajectories other people called irresponsible until the simulations closed. He disliked the word genius because it allowed institutions to pretend unusual work emerged from personality rather than years spent becoming intimately familiar with failure. Most of his useful ideas began as ugly pages no one wanted attached to an official program.

Rory Bozzelli understood how Dean worked, which was why he brought him the ugliest problem available. The monitor continued cycling through transfer windows while an untouched mug cooled on the desk. Rory knocked once before entering.

Dean opened one eye. “What?”

“We need a route to M6-117.”

“What time is it?”

“Three forty-two.”

Dean pushed himself upright. “How bad?”

“The standard transfer is seven hundred thirty days. We need something under two hundred.”

That woke him properly. He turned toward the monitor, where a clean transfer arc glowed across the display, elegant and useless. Aguerra Prime and M6-117 occupied opposing sides of a geometry that seemed arranged specifically to punish urgency.

“All the conventional models converge near seven-thirty,” Dean said. “We can burn hotter or cut mass, but not enough to recover five hundred days.”

He studied the transfer plot again. The route assumed a clean plane change, controlled insertion, and a vehicle that arrived as a spacecraft rather than a projectile. More importantly, it treated the star as an obstacle.

“What can the vehicle survive?” he asked.

“Marco hasn’t built it yet.”

That meant the design could still be made to fit the route instead of the other way around.

Dean pulled the keyboard toward him and began stripping assumptions from the model. The safe thermal margin disappeared first, followed by the standard plane-change sequence and the braking arc. The computer rejected the first route immediately. The second missed M6-117 by six million kilometers, while the third crossed a stellar exclusion zone that would vaporize the guidance package.

Dean continued anyway.

Hours lost their boundaries as he argued with every assumption built into the software. The program expected the probe to preserve itself, conserve fuel, and retain options; Dean instructed it to do none of those things while Rory supplied objections in roughly the order mission review would eventually produce them.

“You removed the abort corridor.”

“There is nowhere useful to abort.”

“The stellar pass exceeds certification and correction window is under three seconds.”

“Then we need better guidance.”

Rory stared at the route. “That’s your answer?”

Dean plotted the influence of every major body in the system, searching for velocity the probe would not have to carry as fuel, then turned to the archives. Decades of rejected proposals filled the trajectory database, each preserving some maneuver once dismissed as too expensive, too dangerous, or unnecessary for the mission that had produced it. To Dean, rejection was simply a library of unused tools.

A solar-observatory proposal from twelve years earlier contained a thermal rotation pattern designed to spread heat across a failing shield. A military courier concept used a staged plane change that traded navigational flexibility for speed, while an asteroid survey had modeled atmospheric entry without orbital capture. No single concept solved the route, but together they suggested a vehicle that behaved less like a probe than a sequence of controlled disasters.

Rory watched the ideas accumulate across the display. “Has any of this ever flown together?”

“No.”

“Any two of them?”

“Not intentionally.”

Rory rubbed a hand over his face. “All right.”

A nearby moon offered almost nothing, and a ringed planet could provide a secondary assist only by adding thirty-six days. The star remained the only mass large enough to buy the time they needed.

Dean imagined the probe falling inward, its outer shell wearing away layer by layer while the guidance core rotated to distribute the heat. At periapsis, a burn lasting only seconds would alter the exit vector toward M6-117. Too early, and the vehicle would pass high. Too late, and it would become a brief cloud of metal inside the corona.

The solution was monstrous, but it possessed a certain beauty, like a bridge erected during a flood and stripped of elegance until nothing remained except purpose.

Rory left and returned with fresh coffee, which Dean forgot to drink. Equations spread through the margins of printed schedules while arrows appeared across orbital maps, were crossed out, and returned at angles no formal mission planner would approve without several days of shouting. The clean route continued to produce the same answer: seven hundred thirty days, with efficient burns, broad thermal margins, and predictable insertion.

It was the route selected when no one at the destination was starving.

Dean removed the arrival orbit. The capsule did not need to become a satellite; it only needed to cross the atmosphere once and place supplies close enough for Y/N to reach. He also abandoned the assumption that every component had to survive. Losing ten percent was acceptable if the remaining ninety contained food. Twenty might be tolerable if the packaging duplicated whatever functions were destroyed.

Medicine could be packed inside shelter material, guidance surrounded by food blocks, and filters wrapped around batteries. The machine did not need to remain whole. It only needed to break in the right order.

Once he accepted that, the transit problem began to loosen. Dean pushed the route closer to the star until the display filled with red warnings. The thermal model predicted failure beneath the standard shell, so he opened Marco’s preliminary mass budget, replaced the casing with layered ablative composite, and watched the vehicle gain weight while the transit time fell. He removed the braking propellant next, buying more days at the cost of another margin.

Every improvement spent certainty, and Dean kept spending.

The model still assumed a payload mass JPL had not achieved, so he replaced the conventional braking system with additional shielding and one violent correction burn. The vehicle would never enter orbit. It only needed to remain functional long enough to release a guided capsule toward Virelia Planitia, where the atmosphere and deployable drag surfaces could shed the remaining velocity.

The capsule would land hard, and some of its contents would break, but food, medicine, batteries, and shelter could all be packaged to survive the impact.

Rory returned near dawn and found Dean barefoot, one shoe lost somewhere beneath the desk. Equations covered the main display, three printed maps, and the back of a takeout receipt, while the coffee he had brought earlier sat untouched beside the keyboard.

“Did you find anything?”

Dean pointed toward the transfer model without looking away from it. “One hundred eighty-six days with the current mass estimate. Maybe one-eighty-two if Marco removes another twelve kilograms.”

Rory stopped beside the desk. “Run it again.”

Dean nodded and began replacing the favorable assumptions with worse ones. He moved the plane correction earlier, surrendering departure velocity to gain the inclination needed before the primary slingshot. The probe would fall inward toward the star, close enough for the gravity well to provide much of the velocity change it could not afford to carry as propellant. It was an ugly trade. The thermal load became severe, the correction window narrowed from hours to minutes, and even a minor delay during the burn would send the vehicle past M6-117 or into its atmosphere too fast for the payload to matter.

The computer processed the revised route and returned one hundred ninety-eight days. Dean adjusted the payload mass, increased the departure burn, and ran it again.

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-SIX DAYS.

He rose so abruptly that the chair struck the wall. The printer had barely begun feeding out the route data when he tore the pages free and left the office, abandoning the missing shoe, the cold coffee, and Rory behind him.

Dean found Mateo in the corridor outside mission control after taking two wrong turns and passing the same coffee station three times. Mateo had one hand pressed to his communicator and looked as though he had not slept since Y/N’s first transmission. Dean collided with him hard enough to scatter the pages between them.

“Sorry.” He dropped into a crouch and began gathering them. “Don’t return that call yet.”

Mateo picked up one of the sheets and stared at the equations. “What am I looking at?”

“A faster intercept.”

“How fast?”

“One hundred eighty-six days.”

Mateo slowly lowered the communicator from his ear.

Within minutes, they had taken the route into the nearest briefing room. Marco joined through a secure projection from JPL, Creed arrived carrying a tablet, and Alice took a place near the wall while Dean covered the board with curves that looked less like orbital mechanics than evidence collected after some private collapse.

“We’ve been designing around orbital insertion,” Dean said. “That costs time and propellant for an outcome we don’t need. The probe doesn’t have to become a satellite. It only has to survive long enough to release the capsule toward the surface.”

Creed stepped closer to the first burn. “You moved the plane change ahead of the slingshot. That costs departure velocity.”

“It converts it. We use the loss to establish the inward dive, and the star supplies the rest of the change.”

Marco leaned toward his screen as Dean marked the periapsis, and his expression shifted almost immediately. “You’re taking it that close?”

“With a rotating ablative shell.”

“What does the thermal model say?”

“That it stays below immediate structural failure.”

“For hardware we haven’t designed.”

Dean nodded. “Which means Castillo gets the rare privilege of designing the hardware around the route.”

Marco ignored that. “Projected arrival?”

“One hundred eighty-six days.”

Before anyone could mistake the best result for a promise, Dean began degrading the model. He reduced booster output by two percent, added six kilograms to the payload, delayed the correction burn by a second, and lowered the efficiency of the thermal rotation near periapsis. Some simulations still reached M6-117 before the food window closed. Others arrived weeks too late, while one entered the atmosphere at such a steep angle that the capsule struck the crust with enough force to make every surviving supply meaningless.

Dean left the failures beside the successful route rather than burying them inside an average. Yoongi studied the spread. “What are the actual odds?”

“Sixty-eight percent of reaching the atmosphere within guidance tolerance.”

“And the odds that the payload survives entry and impact?”

“Structures hasn’t finished that model.”

“They’ll be lower,” Marco said.

Alice worked her way through the failure tree. “Can we launch two?”

“Not two complete vehicles.”

Creed studied the mass figures. “What about a stripped second package? Food, medication, batteries. Nothing else.”

Dean opened another branch of the route and began adapting it for the lower mass while Marco worked through the consequences aloud. Minimal guidance, no shelter membrane, no redundant communications—only dense calories, medication, and enough power to matter after landing.

“It would pull personnel and hardware away from the primary,” Marco said. “Trying to finish both could lower the odds of completing either.”

“Design it,” Mateo said. “Don’t build it yet.”

Yoongi watched the numbers settle before nodding. “If the primary gets ahead, the surplus goes to the second package. If it falls behind, everything returns to the main vehicle.”

The secondary remained on the board, neither approved nor discarded. That was often how hope entered the project: conditional, underfunded, and too important to erase.

Dean placed the conservative arrival estimate beside Y/N’s projected food exhaustion. The two lines left a margin of twenty-six sols, but Mateo began adding the delays the clean model could not account for: a launch slip, a missed correction, interference from M6-117’s storms, an expanded landing ellipse, and the time Y/N would need to reach the capsule while injured. The buffer narrowed with every addition.

“Ten days late cuts the margin almost in half,” Mateo said.

Marco shifted his attention to the fabrication schedule. “Then the launch date has to hold.”

“So do the stop criteria,” Creed said. “A failed test remains a failed test.”

Yoongi looked around the room. “No buried objections. Anyone who finds a real mission failure can stop the launch, regardless of rank.”

The route did not restore the Hab, heal Y/N’s ankle, or guarantee that she would be able to reach the capsule after it landed. It only placed help inside a future she might still be alive to see, which was more future than they had possessed an hour earlier.

Mateo pressed both palms against the table. “What does the landing ellipse look like?”

Dean expanded a map of Virelia Planitia, and a broad region lit across the display. “Best case, within two hundred kilometers of Colony 212. Worst case, the northern basin.”

“She may not be able to travel two hundred kilometers.”

“We can add active drag control.”

Marco looked at him. “With what mass?”

Dean turned toward the payload estimate. “We need twelve kilograms.”

“You need twelve. I need fifty.”

Marco stared at him for a moment before returning to the numbers. Mateo looked from Dean to the board. “This gets there before the food is gone.”

“If we launch on time,” Dean said, “and the guidance core survives periapsis.”

Alice’s expression remained doubtful. “That’s a large if.”

Creed took the pages and checked the calculations in silence while Marco recalculated the payload mass aloud. Mateo remained at the end of the table with Y/N’s report open on his tablet. No one spoke until Creed finally looked up.

“The route closes.”

Yoongi studied the projected arrival and the conditions listed beneath it. “One hundred eighty-six days.”

“At target mass,” Dean said.

Yoongi turned toward Marco’s image. “Can you build for it?”

Marco studied the route for another moment before answering. “I can build something that might survive it.”

“That’s enough to start.”

The decision passed without ceremony. There would be ceremonies later if the mission worked. People would name the route, praise the teams, and describe the project as a triumph of human ingenuity. Inside the room, however, it looked like exhausted adults approving a list of ways a machine might fail.

Yoongi signed the emergency authorization. Alice released the funding without a final total, Creed opened the launch waiver and left the risk field blank until Engineering produced numbers honest enough to enter, and Mateo placed Y/N’s medical report at the top of the project archive so no one could forget what the schedule meant.

Dean had begun gathering his papers when Rory asked, “What are we calling it?”

“We don’t need a name,” Marco said through the projection.

“Procurement does,” Alice replied.

Yoongi looked at the bright line curving dangerously close to the star before crossing the darkness toward M6-117. “Iris.”

No one objected. The project acquired a name and, through the peculiar logic of institutions, became real.

“Use the route,” Yoongi said. “Build the probe.”

© chimcess, 2025. Do not copy or repost without permission.

Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32 @haru-jiminn @rg2108 @darklove2020

[anicacats2111meou]

This SHIP will remain in our heart forever💙🖤

[macamarsme]

Si mis personajes favoritos tuvieran un pokemon. Parte 12.

[blackbeeno3569]

@rotg-halloween Day 1: Creak

[frickfrackapplesnack]

Unreleased Excerpt

Echoes in the Dark:

THIS EXCERPT WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT CHAPTER.

——————————

Tiny droplets lifted from the stone, glimmering like captured starlight as they rose into the air around him. Ice curled at his fingertips, forming intricate, twisting shapes before shattering into diamond dust. More droplets joined them, shimmering and swirling in an unseen current, catching the dim light of the cavern and casting it back in a thousand fractured colours.

Jack had never tried to form a memory that wasn’t his own before.The thought sent a thrill through him—a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. Memories were personal, rooted in feeling, in experience. His own were easy enough to shape, to conjure from the depths of his mind. But this… this was different.

And yet, he could feel the magic in the water, in the very air around him and knew there was a story to tell.

[moonyartsblog]

Series 22 Post 30: No introduction needed 🖤

[neiraserpens]

I was just imagining… what if he had a cat that could see him?