[Starship Scarborough, Transmission 1]

This is Shawn Heart, reporting on behalf of the crew of the Starship Scarborough. We have successfully landed on the surface of Alpha Centauri Ace. The landing was smooth at two minutes-three seconds north, thirty seconds west of the identified destination point. No damage was sustained. All systems functioning properly.

Nineteen crew members awoke from stasis with mild symptoms of nausea and headaches. One icing pod failed, presumably early in the flight. The exact cause of death of crew member Carl Thompson cannot be determined from the remains.

Atmospheric pressure is 1,020 millibars. Oxygen reading at 21.1 percent and Nitrogen is at 77.9 percent with the other trace percentages coming from primarily methane and carbon dioxide. Temperature is ten degrees Celsius with a humidity of thirteen percent. Gravity is at 0.96g's.

The ground appears barren. No signs of life, plant or animal. Soil color is pinkish brown and textured with small rock formations. We observed what appeared to be small oceans on the surface during our approach.

Along with this transmission, we have included photos from our approach, descent, and the view from Starship Scarborough's pilothouse.

We are about to embark on our first walk on the surface. Expect our next transmission soon.

[End Transmission 1]

I'm the last one off the starship, but the dust we kicked up when we landed still hasn't settled. It swirls around the stairs in a brownish-pink cloud, obscuring the surface of Ace Centauri til it's all but gone. I grip the handrails with both hands as I feel my way down. The idea that I'll step off these stairs and fall into nothing claws at the back of my mind, but I push the irrational fear away.

Through the dust, a hand reaches out to me, and a young man's face comes into view. Even partially obscured by his helmet, it's impossible to miss the smile plastered across his features. I recognize him from orientation day—the only day of training where we were allowed to interact with our soon-to-be crew mates—but for the life of me I can't remember his name. I've never been good with names.

For a second, I consider taking the offer for help, but then I think better. I don't want to indulge his need to feel chivalrous, or worse yet, get trapped in a conversation with him.

Instead, I pretend I don't see him and leap off the last step. Dirt crunches under my feet as I land, making me the nineteenth human on this alien world—the nineteenth human to ever step foot outside of our solar system.

The helmet I'm wearing protects me from the dust, but it doesn't do anything to improve visibility. I wave my hand in front of my face, trying to clear it as I pace away from the ship and out of the hazy cloud. By the time I've gone a few dozen yards, the dust has cleared enough to allow me to finally take in the planet from the ground rather than above.

Bands of deep garnet-red and coral-pink mottle the rough surface like marble. The landscape is almost completely flat—desert like. A few small mounds of rock and stone texture it, casting their long shadows across the ground. In the distance where the color fades to grey, rolling hills and dunes rise above the land.

Alpha Centauri A Star hangs low in the sky, shining like a yellow eye as it crawls toward the horizon. Its sister star Alpha Centauri B was visible on our decent, but it has already set. The sky glows orange at the cusp of the planet's surface, fading into a bright cerulean overhead. Starset will go on for a while here. The days are thirty-two hours long.

I glance behind myself. Our starship protrudes from the cloud of settling dust—out of place and alien on this barren land. Her smooth and sleek form is crafted perfectly for entering and leaving a planet's atmosphere, shining glossy and silver even after over thirty years of travel.

The nuclear cells that fueled our voyage have been depleted to the point where another launch would be impossible, but they still hold enough power to provide for the first few years of our mission. Combined with the solar cells we will set up, power should never be an issue.

The starship's cargo hold includes enough food and water to last for months, along with the tools to purify water sources and terraform the surface of Ace for agriculture. Two weeks of our individual training was dedicated just to learning to use the terraform tools.

As I think about setting up our own miniature farm and apartments, I think about my final goodbye with my mom before I left. Even though the trip felt like nothing to me, for her, it's been thirty-two years.

What is she doing right now? Is she even still alive?

A chill rushes down my spine as I imagine the transmission I sent back to Earth—radio waves traveling at light speed across space and time. It will be four and a half years before that message finally reaches its destination.

It will be nine years before we hear anything back.

We are as alone and isolated as any humans have ever been.

"You can remove your helmet, you know," a voice snaps me out of my thoughts.

I turn to face the man who tried to help me down the stairs. He holds his helmet under his arm, his dark hair rustling in the breeze of an alien atmosphere.

"It feels just like Earth air." He grins at me. His smile is slightly lopsided, almost childlike. He can't be much older than I am, making him one of the youngest crew members of the Starship Scarborough.

I take a deep breath of the clean air pumping through my helmet. We all put these suits on before stepping out of the starship because it was protocol. Nineteen criminals following a rule imposed by an authority thirty-two years away from enforcing anything . . . I almost laugh at the irony of it.

I guess fear is a motivating factor, and breathing on an alien world elicits an almost instinctual gut feeling of terror for some reason.

My hands shake as I click the three releases on my helmet in sequence, and with a hiss of pressure escaping, the seal cracks open. I lift the helmet off and set it down on the pink ground. It looks like an ancient artifact, reminding me of one of those fishbowls someone would wear to the moon two hundred years ago.

"I'm America Lee," the man holds out his hand to me.

"Shawn Heart." I return his handshake.

His grip is firm, like an overeager applicant at a job interview.

"Is your name really America?" I ask.

"You can call me Lee." He smiles again.

"I'm going to call you America."

"I'd prefer if you call me Lee."

"You shouldn't have introduced yourself as America, then." I walk away from him, towards the other crew members spreading out across the surface of the planet like ants searching for food. It's a striking scene, the way the starlight casts their long shadows across the mottled surface of the alien planet. I snap a photo with the camera built into the sleeve of my spacesuit.

"I keep thinking about Carl." The ground crunches under America's feet as he jogs a few steps to catch up.

Great. He's a clinger.

"At least he died peacefully in his sleep." I snap another photo. "He didn't know what hit him."

"Are you serious?" A woman standing a couple yards away removes her helmet, flipping her thick black hair over her shoulder. On the side of her neck, a tattoo of a star inked in black stands out against her dark skin. She has a pierced septum, and another set of piercings follow the curve of her right ear, rising all the way from her lobe to the top of the cartilage. "Did you see the nail marks on the inside of the pod around the hinges? In the padding? Carl didn't die in his sleep."

Star takes the opportunity to become the first human to spit on this planet. I half expect it to hiss when it hits the ground, but anticlimactically, it behaves like spit on Earth and does nothing.

"He suffocated," she continues. "Or worse, died of thirst. Imagine that. Being trapped down under the cover of that pod in total darkness. Not knowing how long you've been in there and when it will open. If it will open." She pauses for a second, her dark eyes examining the two of us. "That shit gives me the shivers."

Even America is rendered speechless.

A chill rushes over me. The idea of death—something that permanent and foreign—has haunted me since Lucy died. The thought of being alone in the dark and knowing it is inevitable . . . what else would you have to think about other than death?

It isn't death that scares me the most, it's the thinking about it.

I kick the ground with my boot, sending a pebble of red stone tumbling across the surface as I push the thoughts away.

"The dirt is so . . . pink," I say, more to myself than anyone else. Lucy decided pink was my favorite color when I was five. Our parents asked us what we wanted for Christmas, and she said a purple towel for her and a pink one for me, because those were our favorite colors. I never questioned her decision on that.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" someone calls from behind us.

I turn to face the source of the voice.

An older man squats on the ground, picking at some of the dust and rocks. He presses the pink soil between his gloved fingers. Like the rest of us, he's taken his helmet off by now, and his wispy greys stick up in strands with the worst case of hat hair. He looks like he's been jolted by a bolt of electricity. I can only assume he was convicted for being a mad scientist of some sort.

"It's not dirt, though," he continues. "It's grass. Or, I supposed it is more similar to moss or mold, actually."

"But . . . it's pink."

"It evolved in a different environment than Earth. The pigment looks red because it absorbs more of the higher frequency spectrum—blues and greens."

"I know that." I cross my arms over my chest. I don't like when people explain things to me that I already know.

"That's why life at the bottom of the sea is all red," he continues explaining anyway. "Only the blue light penetrates the ocean far enough to reach the bottom, so in order to photosynthesize, life has to have what appears as a red pigment."

"The atmosphere here is almost the same as it is on Earth," I tell him. "And Alpha Centauri A Star's light spectrum is nearly identical to the sun's."

"Even just a small variation would have an effect on the way life evolves." He claps his hands together, knocking some of the mold-dust off his gloves. "There are three stars in the sky here, remember? Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri may be further away, but that doesn't mean they don't have an effect. Random chance plays a part in it, too, as well as the conditions of the planet. The minerals and nutrients in this soil might have a very different chemistry to Earth's. Maybe this planet was covered in primarily water during its infancy. Or, perhaps this life didn't even originate here."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Star cuts into the conversation, hands on her hips.

"Ace could have been a rogue planet captured by the Centauri star system. Or, maybe life was brought here on an asteroid."

"Or maybe it was brought here on another Starship." America smirks like he thinks he's funny or something.

"A Starship piloted by mold and bacteria." Star kicks at the pink dirt and spits again. She takes a seat on the ground next to the old man, stretching her legs out in front of her and leaning back like she's tanning on a beach. "Sounds lovely."

"They would have just been hitchhikers in that case." He acts like the remark was meant to be serious. "We probably even brought along some of our own."

After taking out a collection bag from his pocket, the mad scientist scrapes a sample of dirt and mold into it. We were all trained for a lead task on the mission—guess he got stuck with botany. It seems like he enjoys it, at least, and I suppose it beats my task. I was the lucky individual assigned lead of communication—if I can even call it that. Our transmissions are hardly more than glorified diary entries with how long they take to reach Earth.

I crack my neck to the side and pull my arm across my chest, my bones and joints popping as I stretch. After being crunched up in a tiny pod for thirty-two years, I'm just a little bit stiff.

"You seem young to be a convicted criminal with a life sentence." America puts his hand on my shoulder for balance, stretching out his quad like he thinks we are about to go for a jog together or something.

"So do you," I reply. "And don't touch me." I remove his hand from my shoulder. "I'll have you know, I'm fifty-six years old."

He pauses for a second and then grins. "But you don't look a day over twenty-four. You don't strike me as the criminal type. Shawn Heart . . . I think I remember hearing about your trial. You're Robin Hood, aren't you?"

"That's what they called me in the news." I lean over to stretch my hamstring, and America mimes my action.

"That case was so controversial. You would have only gotten twenty years, but then when they asked what you were planning to do when you got out, you said . . . what were your exact words?" He pauses, almost chuckling. "'Cover my tracks more carefully next time!'"

I shrug. "I was under oath."

"Your mouth and temper got you in trouble." He smirks at me.

"And what did you do to get a life sentence, Captain America?" I shoot back. "You don't strike me as the criminal type, either."

A pause. He lowers his voice to a whisper. "Treason."

I raise an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Let's just say, the United States was really lucky that when Russia opened those Top Secret files I sent them, they were somehow corrupted and completely unreadable." He winks.

I narrow my eyes. Why would he send top secret files that were purposefully corrupted? Suddenly, it clicks. "You faked treason to get thrown in prison so you could get on this mission?"

"It's always been my dream to go into space. To go to another planet." He smiles, a hint of sadness behind it. "By the time the mission would get approved for civilians, I would be ancient."

I'm silent for a few seconds. "That's reckless and . . . stupid."

Yet, for some reason, I can respect it. He took a huge risk, but he did it for something he was passionate about.

But wait. Our mission was never announced publicly. I furrow my brow. "But how did you find out about the mission in the first place? You must have known—"

I'm interrupted when a man's voice comes over the headset radio we are all wearing.

"Hey y'all." His words break up in static. "I found something over here. I can't make it out too well from this distance, but it's strange."

My heart skips a beat in my chest, but I don't know why. My teeth chatter.

America holds down the button on the wrist of his suit to speak. "This is America Lee at the starship base. Who is this and what is your location? Over."

"This is Lou Dupont. I'm about a mile north of the landing site." More static. "There's some sort of landform on the horizon. Fuck . . . I don't know what I'm looking at."

"All right, keep it in view, but don't approach yet. We'll send a team to join you to check it out."