Derelict void mission fail2/29/2024 Overhead, the shadowy girth of Aires half-eclipses the sun. I strike the surface like a hammer from the stars.Ī carpet of purple moss clutches at rocks beneath a sparse canopy of vegetation. Chasms and peaks and rivers choked with vegetation. A world we were meant to explore together. Tango’s surface approaches, rich with alien life. Instead, she stares stoically at the overhead. I want her to yell, to curse my failure, to remind me of the lives already lost on account of my flaws. Heat tattoos my metal body.Īkiko neither trembles nor blinks. The capsule, a fifteen-meter diameter sphere packed with the mission’s most critical components, is all that remains of me. Ninety percent of my remaining mass sheds like dead skin. “You just said they were useless! The extra mass is only going to complicate our landing.” “Captain, without our thrusters we’ll be helpless–” Her grimace indicates that she understands. “Captain, the fire has spread to all external decks.”Ī flash of pain crosses her face. “All personnel to the piloting capsule immediately,” she says. Emergency lights cut deep shadows into her skin. We have a two percent chance at a successful landing.”Īkiko grips her blast harness. “I’ve plotted an emergency entry course, but the thrusters’ fuel cells are flooded. A scream carries across the open comms channel. The piloting capsule becomes a reverberation chamber, the cacophony sending Akiko’s hands to her ears. “All personnel to the central piloting capsule!” Captain Akiko Yamamura says, although she must know it’s too late for that. My flesh has failed me, and I have failed the twelve crewmembers of this expedition. Finally, it rent asunder on approach as a sudden and violent stream of charged particles from Aires, the smaller planet, slipped across the threshold into the magnetosphere of the larger Tango.īy then it was too late. Then a stray speck of interstellar dust enlarged it, perhaps during the recent nineteen years of acceleration, or the ensuing nineteen years of braking, while the crew slept. Too small to register during integrity tests, the defect passed unnoticed through my first five missions. There is a fissure in the anterior lining of my hull - a birth defect from the Callisto shipyards that once churned me and my four sisters into the void. I am a raging fireball descending toward a binary planet.
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