Dedication

To everyone who's experienced unexpected change, uncertainty, and loss—i.e. all of us. Ride the waves of change best you can. Whoop with joy when you catch a good one.🏄‍♂️🤸‍♀️

She'd been so careful. Had followed the rules; always triple-checked everything.

All to avoid disaster.

It'd happened anyway.

A hijacked warp jump—an alien abduction. Her crewmates dead, their brains unprepared for the warp stresses of the prolonged transit to uncharted space.

Staring past memories of blood and death, Pan rested her forehead against the observation window of her father's lab. Outside in the science institute's research garden, insect wings flickered in the fading light, the crepuscular life of Neo 5's tropical zone rising with the day's golden death.

They weren't alone in the gloom.

A crowd in desolate black. Sentinels around a spider-limbed robot toiling at the centre of the garden.

Digging a hole.

Pan tightened her grip on the metal urn she held, watching the hole deepen. She remembered to breathe. Barely.

She'd survived terrible things: being lost in uncharted space; the alien invasion of her mind. She'd drifted unconscious in the ruins of the science vessel SS Adiona for weeks in some unnatural stasis. Then she'd been rescued ... only to come home to face more pain.

She hugged her father's remains, stomach swirling. Unlike her crewmates, her father had passed peacefully after a long life with few regrets. She should've been—was—grateful for that, but...

Her next inhalation jerked. Since her mother's passing decades ago, Enoch Sahar, mad inventor and scientific theorist, had been her mentor, her cheerleader—her rock.

And she so desperately needed something steady to tether herself to.

A shadow joined her, a lean figure in black. Sneakers squeaked on polished tiles—shoes that'd caused frowns in the crowd of scholars and dignitaries outside.

Pan glanced down, following the dark fall of her hair and shapeless dress until her gaze found the shoes planted next to her bare feet. Day-glow yellow laces escaped the hems of formal slacks. As the sneakers' owner moved to prop his lanky frame against the window, pressure-colourised soles rippled with rainbows.

"Professor Dina thinks trauma has regressed my mental age." The soft words, spoken many inches above her head, held confusion. "Why would a manufacturer supply adult sizes if Flashy Feet were meant only for children?"

Pan looked up into unfocused blue eyes. The reserved man she'd met when she'd joined the SS Adiona's crew was gone. Like the rest of her crewmates, Kiran McQueen hadn't survived their ship's hijacking. Unlike the rest of the crew, but like her, he'd encountered an alien with zero respect for the boundaries of human minds—and those of life and death.

Alien biotech had rebuilt Kiran's brain. He wasn't entirely himself.

Wasn't entirely human.

Pan turned back to the window. How many of the scientific heads gathered outside would explode if given the details of Kiran's recent 'head trauma'? "Did the professor say that to your face or just think it?" Telepathy. Her father, in his final days, had found that fascinating.

"I don't remember." Kiran frowned. "Her mental voice is as loud as her acoustic one. I can hear it from here. She thinks it's dark enough to plant your father's tree. It's starting to bioluminesce."

To the side of the crowd, a small ghost had materialised, branches and leaves a tracery of blue-green light. Lambent venation. One of her father's inventions. An alternative to streetlights so popular the colony was a wonderland at night.

"The mayor is also thinking it's time to start the ceremony." Kiran turned. "I have the song your father wanted, along with a terabyte of others. Janus' collection of old Earth music could fill a planet's data storage."

Pan looked to the deepest shadows. Next to Kiran's sleek, dark sister, a man with tawny hair stood, myriad piercings winking, plasma pistol low on one hip. Janus, one of her unlikely rescuers; another guest who inspired frowns. As an outerworld finder from civilisation's edge, he wasn't someone a timid, law-abiding citizen like her should ever have met.

She couldn't regret that she had.

He'd entertained her bedridden father with forgotten Earth culture. One twentieth-century song featuring a poignant Taiwanese chant had struck a chord: "Return to Innocence". For her father, the idea of his matter returning to a primitive state to start anew had held spiritual and scientific appeal. He'd requested "the atoms he'd briefly borrowed" be returned to the wild wonders of the universe.

Pan moved her gaze over square garden beds, irrigation, and sensors. Burying her father under a lab-designed tree in a heavily monitored research garden with a curated carbon cycle didn't seem "wild".

Kiran pressed his lips to her uncombed hair, easy affection the man he'd been months ago would've found impossible. "You're not ready for the ceremony to start."

No response was necessary. Not with Kiran.

He stepped back. "Your father's old lab assistant is thinking she'd like to break open his last batch of synthesised whiskey. I think I'll go encourage her to follow impulse."

On flashing feet, her ex-crewmate left the lab, off to cause trouble—buy her time to pull herself together.

To say goodbye.

Breath trembling, Pan turned her back on the grieving shadows outside. Pulling herself together seemed impossible. Inexplicable alien forces had kept her intact until her rescue, but she was broken all the same—pieces of her lost in uncharted space.

She couldn't seem to grab them back.

Skimming a look over the darkening lab, she felt the hole of the largest missing piece. Metal and plastic glinted on workbenches and shelves: her father's tools, machines, and concoctions. Enoch Sahar had been an inventor, a man of science—someone dedicated to rational thought and logic.

Such as, the simplest explanation was likely the correct one.

And the answer was simple.

She couldn't pull herself together because ... she wasn't sure she wanted to.

She drifted to her father's main work terminal. She'd been told he'd kept a regimentally ordered desk for most of his life; then he'd become a father. Stuffed animals and jam stains had become part of the décor. A plastic telescope—her first—still sat on the 3D printer he'd used to make parts for his inventions. Drawings from her scribble tablet at age four sat framed next to the star maps and astrological imagery she'd created decades later in the course of her work.

She touched the corner of one image: the Lotus Nebula, a vast cloud of dust and gas she'd studied on her first exploration mission. As a joke, her father had superimposed a picture of her pudgy-cheeked three-year-old self, along with a quote from a long-lost, Earth philosopher.

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

The amused love that echoed through those words squeezed her chest, set her heart pounding—too fast. She'd hated chaos. Had sought order and rules—anything to keep herself and others safe; anything to avoid mistakes.

And still her crewmates had died.

And still her mind had been invaded.

And still her father had left her.

She sank to the floor, arms around the remains of the man who'd spent his life trying to map the universe's chaos and ride its waves. As darkness swelled, claiming the room, her world threatened to tunnel to black.

And why should she fight that? It was inevitable. Day had faded. Only night awaited.

She almost heard her father scoff. Didn't the local star continue to burn? Didn't day simply lie elsewhere in time and space?

Her pulse skipped. Lifting her gaze, she looked down the line of workbenches to a door guarded by biometric security.

Broken as she was, she didn't think, didn't second-guess—only acted.

With a wave of her palm, the door opened to a long corridor. Without thought, she ran, bare feet slapping against cold concrete, her father's urn clutched to her chest.

What awaited set her pulse thundering.

A gleaming silver spaceship, its predatory lines reminiscent of a praying mantis. Her father's design, inspired by her first biology project and her nascent interest in space at age five. After pimping the ship out with interstellar research tech, he'd called it their Star Hunter.

It'd been her first ride into space at seven years of age.

It would be her first again: her first step off solid ground since returning.

A journey she'd never believed she'd make.

The claustrophobia of a spacesuit. Memories of darkness and panic rose, making her hands shake as she fitted the gear and sealed her father in a void-rated container. But she didn't stop moving. In a whirling haze, she found herself in the cockpit, tapping flight-request icons and running pre-launch checks. Airspace Control talked at her—barely heard words.

She okayed what she could, then left the voices to babble, unable to find the paranoid woman who'd have gnawed her lip bloody checking everything again and again.

She could only find the one whose heart raced as she punched ignition.

A roar. Launch engines—a beast waking. The plastic butterfly dangling in front of the windshield, a childhood relic, bounced wildly on its elasticated string. The countdown sounded.

Then the monster broke free; yanked her with it, up into hell.

Shuddering, thundering violence: the battle to pull free from the planet. It was all she could do to draw air as increasing acceleration forces piled bricks onto her chest—building to three times normal gravity.

Eight and a half minutes of crushing acceleration.

Zero to over twenty-eight thousand kilometres an hour.

Nothing on the surface of any planet could prepare a person for the sheer brutality of leaving it.

"Ten seconds to engine shut off." An automatic warning—inhuman, calm.

Gritting teeth, Pan counted down: Three ... two ... one—

Instant quiet: shut off. An abrupt sense of stillness, the result of her inner ear telling her brain she was stationary, simply because nothing was applying a force. No engine. No planet's gravity. In reality...

She was in space, in orbit, travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour.

In the false tranquillity, she unclipped her harness and floated out of her seat. Weightlessness. She recalled the childish joy of her first experience of it; remembered her father's chuckle as she'd promptly thrown up.

That second, the churn in her gut had a different source.

Not her usual paralysing anxiety.

Something that demanded action.

She grabbed her father's ashes; propelled herself to the ship's airlock. Breath harsh in the confines of her helmet, she prepped for vessel exit.

Beyond the outer hatch's porthole, light burned, the hydrogen-fusing fury of the local star 'rising' beyond the planet's edge as the ship chased the dawn.

She opened the hatch, pushed out into nothing.

Incomprehensible terror. In the limitless black, everything she loved and knew was an infinitesimal blip in space and time.

She held her father in the darkness, embracing pain just one ... more ... minute. Then stretched her arms out—released the container's lid.

Air, urn, and ash exploded into space—shoved her back towards the ship. For an instant, her father's remains glittered in the unfiltered sunlight; molecules and atoms that'd once sung with his consciousness.

Then they were gone.

The pressure in her chest released. On the ground, her father had been ash.

Here, in the hammering radiation of a G2V yellow dwarf, he was star dust.

Music broke over her helmet's comm. Her father's song: "Return to Innocence".

A figure manoeuvred in beside her, spacesuit thrusters firing in pale bursts.

Kiran, his spacecraft now docked with hers.

He let the song play out. Let the void's silence return.

A new pressure built in her chest, something hot—ungovernable. "He's not gone."

"No," Kiran agreed. "He's on a new journey. Like you are."

"I'm broken." The fractures burned with an unfamiliar reckless spark.

The mirrored heatshield of Kiran's helmet hid his face, but she 'felt' his smile, the understanding of someone shattered and remade. "You like it."

She watched the dawn blaze molten along the edge of the planet. "Yeah."

Broken could mean 'something new'.

This is the concluding story in the RiST series of linked short stories.

Acknowledgements, Copyright, and Challenge Details

This short story was written for the Ultimate Sci-Fi SmackDown challenge (2021-2022): round 4. Challenge details:  Write a short story and a poem using the four prompts. The prompts used for the short story were the word 'crepuscular', the song 'Return to Innocence' by Enigma, and the quote 'You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star' by Friedrich Nietzsche.