Medea

By theidiotmachine

Hello, kind reader. Look, as I said to Jinnis: I done fucked up.

I had this amazing idea. I can pitch it to you if you like: it was The Martian meets 65, with a woman protagonist, and a dark secret. (That's not the full pitch, but it means there's no spoilers.) I started writing it. I wrote furiously, and I was enjoying it, and when I went back to edit, I was still enjoying it. And I wrote and wrote.

I'm over 6k words now, and I haven't even vaguely finished. I haven't really started! I wrote a solid chapter one and two, and a teaser for chapter three.

Look. Have it all. It doesn't finish. I'm sorry. I'm not normally this undisciplined. But it's pretty good and you might like it?

Chapter One

Thea Yadav woke with a start. Everything was black, and she couldn't move.

She couldn't move, but nevertheless she was being moved: she was being shaken like a giant had her in his fist and was trying to dislodge her. Metal screamed around her, and with a horrible, wrenching thud, she began to spin, her world flipping over and over.

She was thrown left and then right, and white pain lanced through her knee. She screamed, but her mouth was so dry that it was nothing more than a croak.

With a crunch, and a thud, she stopped. Everything went quiet except for the sound of her ragged breathing and her heart thudding in her chest. It was still dark. She still couldn't move.

It was nice just lying quietly, though.

Shit fuck shit, she thought. I'm alive. I'm in a capsule.

Three soft beeps sounded, then she heard the gloopy throb of impact gel being pumped away. Her arms loosened, the fluid no longer trapping her in place, and she pulled them up, trying to control her panic. She fumbled in the darkness, running clumsy hands along blank coffin-like walls, and found the shapes of release catches. Her fingers shook so much that she failed the first time, but on the second, she twisted two knobs, and with a brief roar the capsule doors blew open, and her eyes were filled with grey morning light.

The suit heads-up display flickered on, a dozen status lights all red, dancing in her peripheral vision, but she was more interested in her knee, which sang with pain. Enough gel had been pumped out of her suit that she could sit up, although the pain was so bad that she wasn't sure she would be able to.

Come on, she told herself. Let's go.

She grabbed handles and pulled herself to sitting; as she did, her dislocated knee slid and clicked into place in a white heat of agony. She screamed, a short hoarse moan, but then the hurt subsided, leaving nothing but a dull ache. She sat, panting, letting the pain leak out of her. She looked up.

She was in a planetary ejection capsule – what civilians would call an escape pod. This capsule was in a crater, a wide shallow hole created by braking thrusters and raw kinetic energy. And around that was forest, lit by a low, orange sun, the dark green trees still and silent.

The gel had been mostly pumped out of both the capsule and her suit, although the stuff clung to her like remorse. When she stood in her little coffin and leaned over its edge, it flopped off her limbs, slapping down onto the rich soil, pooling and collecting dirt. She hunted around and found a way off – there, railings, designed to be climbed on, more-or-less intact. So, down she went, wincing whenever she put weight on her bad knee. Her breath was loud in her tiny, plastic helmet, every laboured gasp a roar in her ears.

She reached the ground, and paused as long as she dared, waiting for her shaking limbs to regain some semblance of control. She breathed deeply, the noise reverberating in her helmet.

Holy shit. I just survived an emergency landing. I... I'm somewhere.

I need to talk to whoever's left. I need to get help.

The capsule's thrusters were smashed into the dark soil, and vapour was evaporating from its sides and the devastation around her. It was streaked with damage, long scars scored across its sides, all its paintwork burned off. It was never moving again.

Her training kicked in, conditioning from months of emergency simulations.

No, first I need to live, she thought. I need to find food and water.

She limped around the capsule to the rear, to see how much of the emergency provisions had survived. Her leg was filled with dull pain, every movement hard; but, from the way it wasn't bathed in agony she knew that it had been dislocated, not broken, and so she made herself feel grateful for every step.

Her suit beeped twice; it wanted something. She tapped the sleeve console. It had finished its analysis of the atmosphere. It was breathable.

She unsealed her helmet completely, and put it down on the ground beside her. There was still gel in there, between her helmet and her breathing mask and goggles, and it splashed on the ground next to her. She rolled her head around, easing the muscles in her neck. Then she took off her mask and goggles, letting them hang from her neck, and she sniffed.

The air was filled with the scent of rich, peaty earth, and smoke. It smelt alive, and vibrant, and full of hope.

Holy shit, she thought. This must be Medea. I got here.

With the helmet and goggles off, she could see with her eyes, not the suit sensors. The sunlight dazzled her, but in a good way; it was like being outside for the first time in a long time. It was gently warm on her forehead, and a slow, lazy wind buffeted her short, dark hair, slick with impact gel.

I have been in a ship for ninety-five years, she thought. This is what I came here for, for the feel of wind on my face and the way that trees steam in the morning sun. This is not what I was expecting when I set off, but here I am.

Now, why the hell am I here?

The capsule cargo hatch was largely intact, with just some scrapes and bashes to show for its descent from space. She tapped the suit's controls and the door swung open. The stuff inside was packed in with more impact gel, and she waited for that to slop out before reaching in.

As soon as she started itemising the cargo, reading off the provided list, she realised that something was wrong: there was no communications antenna. Everything else was as it should be, food, power packs, rope, tent, all the other survival gear stashed in its place.

This is insane, she thought. I can eat but I can't speak to the ship. How did that happen?

She flopped down to the ground, uncaring that she was slumped in a mess of gel and soil; she sat with her back to the capsule, and looked up to the brightening sky.

What the absolute fuck.

Her mind was spinning, full of noise and panic. Her hands were still shaking, and she wanted nothing more than to be in a warm bed, crying. She exhaled, inhaled, keeping each slow and controlled. Her heart slowed.

If this is Medea, this means we made it. That the Bright Orb finished its long journey from my home on Fisher Station to here. But, for some reason, instead of me being up there on the ship, prepping on of the landing shuttles, I was ejected in this capsule.

A white dot hurtled across the sky, from one horizon to the other.

That's artificial, she thought. A satellite, a shuttle, or maybe even the colony ship itself. That's good. I'm not completely on my own. If that was the ship, that's where I fell from.

She shook her head, amazed at the fact that she was alive, that all that potential energy hadn't just smeared her across the landscape like paste.

Okay, I have to contact whoever's left. There might be other capsules, although they might have landed hundreds of kilometres away. Or maybe this was a malfunction, and everyone else is up on the Orb, wondering where I am.

She remembered a training exercise. She'd been angry, and hadn't thought it was worth going to: every colony target planet was a death sentence, and nothing bad ever happened, so a capsule landing was impossible, so why bother? The instructor had looked at her, like she was a child. She'd said a thing which had stayed with her, and it was this: ignore me, I don't care. But the rule of survival on an alien planet is that you need to get through the next hour. And the one after that, so maybe think about that, but right now, your priority is the next hour.

She sat, the morning sun leaking golden rays into her crater, and she tried to slow her breathing.

What is my next hour?

There is oxygen, so that's the next thirty seconds. So the first hour of my next two days requires water. And then, shelter. This is a planet with clouds and trees. It has rain. I can find water. I can do this, and that's how I get through this hour, and the next one.

She stared at the sun above her. It was more orange than she was used to, and larger, but it was a sun: it poured warmth on her, the heat soaking into her suit and bleeding into her bones.

Next hour. Let's go.

She stood, pulling herself up on the capsule. Her leg was already less painful, although she knew that by ignoring its pain would have a cost at some point. She breathed in, enjoying the clean air, and then rooted through the emergency provisions, shaking off the impact gel.

Clouds gathered above her, and it started to drizzle; the flecks of water ran down her neck, into her suit. They were cold, but it had been so long since she'd felt rain that actually it was a benediction, the planet gently welcoming her. The rain washed away the gunk dripping from her hair and suit, and she felt like she was being cleaned by this alien world.

How long has it been since I've been on a planet? Ninety five years from Fisher Station, but more from Earth... a hundred and something years, maybe. But that's not experiential time. I lived on Fisher for seven years, and I was awake on the ship for what, eighteen months. A year and a half in those tiny metal rooms, with only one other person for company...

It all came flooding back as her mind clawed its way to full function from the deep sleep of hibernation, and she paused, hand in the muck of the hold.

Garret. I spent the last year with Garret.

She could see his stupid grin, his stupid scruffy blonde hair. The way he laughed with her, at her, at everything. The way the sweat beaded on his forehead...

She pulled out a knife, and set it down on the ground.

Shipboard romances weren't unusual, especially for the crews of the long-haul colony ships. The AI woke up people to maintain things, run manoeuvrers, to keep everything ticking over. But it was lonely, with just you and a disembodied voice, and the best way to cope was to have another person, someone who'd been personality checked to be compatible enough that you could manage one, two years together in a metal tube so far away from the rest of humanity that they may as well not exist.

Garret was an engineer, someone who fixed stuff. She was a pilot, and her job had been to help slingshot the Orb past some unnamed sun. They'd been awake at the same time, a couple in a lonely house of tiny metal rooms and corridors.

And yes, they'd fallen in love.

She picked up a pouch of dried food.

This is ninety-five years old, she thought. But, I'm pretty sure that's well within its best before date.

She pushed it into one of her suit pockets, only half thinking about it.

Garret.

The rain was falling more heavily now, pooling in the crater, splashing off her suit. She'd left her helmet facing up, and a puddle was forming in it, so she picked it up and shook it out. The gel fell out with the water.

They hadn't meant to. She'd swore that she was going to stay away, because he had a wife in hibernation. So every moment with her was stolen from someone else, a promise broken...

Water, shelter, food, she thought. This rain looks like it's going to really hammer down. I might need to swap some of those priorities.

There was a rucksack in the hold. She filled it with as much of the emergency kit as she could, slotting each thing in. Then she fastened the tent and sleeping bag to the top of it with bungee cords, and hoisted the whole thing on her back, and took stock of where she was. She was cold now, and she shivered, the rain icy and no longer welcome.

She was in a valley. There were hills on either side, all covered in the same trees, huge alien things which looked like palms with vast dark green, round leaves. The rain bounced off them, and ran down them, and they swayed in the wind. The capsule had flown down the valley, its impact scar running parallel to the two hill lines, which made sense: its autopilot would be avoiding the hills, and giving it as much space and time as it could to slow down.

Well, she thought: valleys are formed by rivers, or at least streams. And I need running water to survive. I don't think I can count on rain. So, let's try and get to the centre of the valley, and find the water. I bet there's another, bigger river at the mouth of the valley, and I bet if I wanted to, I could follow that to a sea.

Do I want to? I'm not sure. The other option is up. No water, but maybe I could get enough height that I could contact the ship. At the end of the day, I'm just missing an antenna. The suit has a radio.

She stopped, unsure. The rain came harder, the raindrops clattering off the capsule. The gel in her short dark hair dripped out onto her suit. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

Right, that's a reason to stay away from the tops of the hills, she thought. I haven't come all this way to be struck by lightning. Plus, water.

She pulled out the packet of dried food, and read its label.

What's this supposed to be? French onion soup. Great, I guess. Yeah, I need water.

She pushed it back into her pocket and then climbed up out of the crater, scrambling up the soil wall. The ground beyond was littered with flattened trees, blasted down by the capsule's landing thrusters. Beyond them was the forest edge, the foliage dark and quiet except for the patter of rain. She stepped forward, alert.

Closer, she could see that the tree leaves were circular, but not flat. They were all like huge bowls, between a foot and two foot wide. The rain collected in them, running into the centre. In the puddles, black dots wiggled around.

There are plants like that on Earth, she thought. They have a symbiotic relationship with the animals in their pools. That means I can't drink that water; I have no idea if those creatures secrete toxins, or even if they're poisonous themselves.

Stepping into the forest was a relief. The majority of the rain was caught in the leaves, and the wind was lessened, blunted by the trees. According to the compass hanging round her neck, she was walking west.

She looked down to her helmet in her left hand.

I don't know if I should wear this, she thought. It's opaque. I can only see out of it with the goggles, and they use power. But I have no idea about this planet. When I was looking at the deep space scans with Garret, we joked about carnivorous plants...

Garret.

She put her helmet on, and sealed it, but set the rebreather on her suit to filter the atmosphere rather than use her limited supply of air. She shut down as many functions as she could, so that it used as little power as possible. She felt slightly more protected now, although it was weird hiking in a spacesuit. She set off, down the gentle slope. The soil was springy under her boots, and the world smelled citrusy and fresh.

Look, I can't avoid it any more, she thought. Did he do this?

Her memory was still vague, gummy, as if everything was covered in sheets of grey paper. But, she was sure: at the end of their time together, he'd gotten weird. He'd avoided her, producing obviously fake excuses. At the time she'd assumed that it was his way of detaching himself, and she had let it go. In some ways it was easier than actually confronting the issue of their affair.

But what if he rigged this?

The last day of her waking time on the ship came back to her like the lightning which flashed above.

He was in the capsule bay. He said his last job before he slept was to run maintenance on them. He... Holy fucking shit.

Chapter Two

The ground was rolling down gently, and she was walking at a gentle stroll. There didn't seem any point in over-exerting herself, and her leg was responding well to the pace. She heard the stream before she saw it; a burbling channel of clear water, working its way through the rich earth, meandering around the dark roots of the alien trees.

She knelt down next to it, and put down her backpack. From it she took out a black pot, and dipped it in to the stream, the water cold even through her suit gloves. Then she pulled it out and screwed the cap on, shook away the excess from the outside, and tapped a button on her suit console.

It's hard to murder someone on a spaceship, she thought. No, that's not true. It's easy – hysterically easy – to murder someone, but it's hard to make it look like an accident. While you're asleep the AI is keeping you alive, and there are detailed postmortems of the deaths. And when you're awake, there are cameras everywhere, and the AI knows everything you're doing. It has records. And I rather liked the Orb's AI. I doubt it would collude with a murderer.

The sample container flashed a single red light. Data scrolled onto her suit's HUD. The water had trace alien proteins which she couldn't digest, but not in huge quantities. In other words, nothing too toxic, but there were a few microbes living in it, and they probably wouldn't give her the shits. Probably.

She tapped her wrist console. Yes, the proteins would denature into something much more digestible, if she blasted them with ultrasonic sound. She hit the button, and the pot shivered in her hand as it sonicated the water. She set it down.

The capsule won't launch unless it assesses that I'm more likely to survive outside the ship than inside, she thought. And in practice that means a planet with an atmosphere that it can land on. Where colony ships go that's pretty unusual: most colony target planets are at most prebiotic, and sometimes they're sterile hellholes. But this place, Medea, we picked it because we knew that it had an atmosphere. But it even has proper multicellular life! We had thought that it just had a sea full of algae, but here they are, trees and little wiggly things. Incredible.

She took her helmet and mask off, and set them down by the stream, being careful not let them get too close and get splashed by the water. It was nice, sitting next to the little brook while the rain pattered on the leaves above her.

Garret knew that Medea had an atmosphere. And he's an engineer, so he knows how the capsules work. Could he have sent me out to die, made it look like an accident? Just because he couldn't face me in the cold light of morning?

The pot finished its cycle. She took out the soup packet, tore the top off and poured the water in. She tucked the little piece of waste plastic into a suit pocket; she didn't want to be the first person to litter on this pristine world.

A chemical heating element popped on in bottom of the packet. She swirled the pouch around, dissolving the powder. The smell of it drifted up. This was no better than ship food, and she'd had enough of that; but her hunger was surfacing from the fog of hibernation, and its bite was sharp.

She blew into the pouch, and took a sip. It was only tepid, the flavours artificial and unsubtle but to her famished mouth it was delicious. The rain rattled on the trees above, and she closed her eyes and enjoyed the smell. This was living.

Let's assume that he's not that much of a dick, she thought. That he actually didn't do this on purpose. I think I'd like to believe that, at least for the moment. What are the alternatives?

The ship doesn't have enough capsules for everyone. The reality is, no one on a colony ship has ever been saved by a capsule, ever: the ship just explodes, or freezes, or far more likely, everyone gets there safely and the colony fails and everyone dies on the planet. But we have to have one for each member of the crew because of ancient safety laws which no one ever repealed. So if this is the one time that a colony ship actually ejected its crew safely while the passengers died – perhaps best to not think about that – well, then there are other capsules, relatively nearby.

She sipped her soup. It was warmer now, and the scent wafted up from the pouch, sharp and earthy. Its heat lifted something in her core, giving her a new shard of hope.

Her suit pinged a message to her; she glanced down at the wrist console, and laughed. The sound was loud and bitter against the pattering rain.

Merry Christmas, she thought. Merry Christmas indeed. Dear God, I had no idea.

She lifted the soup in a mock toast, and smiled; weirdly, the fact that this was Christmas Day had improved her mood further. Not that she was Christian: her mother had been a Hindu, and her father was, well, whatever the hell he had been on a given week, but not a Christian, ever, as far as she could remember.

But, she was alive, even if no one else was.

Okay, she thought. If the ship ejected the crew, right now they're in the same position I'm in, near craters, on the ground... Although, presumably they all have aerials. The fact that's missing is still weird. So either I can contact them on the ground, or I can contact the ship.

She stood, soup in hand, her mind made up.

I need to talk to someone. I need to find out if Garret did, in fact, try and kill me, or if this is because of a real emergency. I'm not sure which is better, frankly. But at least I know where the stream is; I can live for at least a handful of days now.

She scooped out another pot-full of water, snapped the lid on, kicked off the purification cycle, and pushed it into a sleeve pocket. The sun was higher in the sky now, and the rain had died away. Feeling rather more hopeful, she walked back to the capsule, helmet in one hand, soup in the other.

Water, shelter, food, she thought. Water – check. Food – short term, yes. So, shelter, and now a new agenda item: I need an aerial.

#

The landing site was a scar cut into the valley. She felt sorry that she'd left such a nasty wound on this quiet, calm world.

The capsule's landing engines had flattened a tear-drop shaped area around the crater itself. She walked around it, picking her way over the smashed branches and leaves. It didn't take her long to notice the glint of metal strewn amongst the broken foliage. She bent down, expecting to find shards of the capsule, but instead it looked like a fine wire, poking from one of the smaller branches. She picked it up, surprised.

The metal was running through the plant, as if it had been threaded there. She pulled the knife from her pack, and ran it lengthwise along the wood; it split open, revealing dozens of shining threads. She teased out a short length of one; it was like fine spun steel.

She tossed this one aside, and walked to another, larger branch. This time the metal was thicker, millimetres in diameter, not threads but fine rods. Then she moved to the largest one she could find, and the rods were nearly as wide as her little finger.

She put her knife away, and sat on her haunches.

These trees have some way of depositing metal to form part of their structure, she thought. It makes them strong, although, dear God, I was lucky earlier because I bet they get hit by lightning a lot. That must be how they can support the weight of all that water on their leaves.

All this metal means they will be opaque to radio, though. There's no way I can talk to anyone while I'm amongst all this metal. That's bad. But I now have the materials I need to build an aerial. Hell, I can probably build any structure I like, although, again, lightning. Huh.

Damn it, though. This means they might not burn. It's going to be a cold night.

The sun was higher in the sky now, orange and pale above the thinning clouds. The rain had stopped, and a gentle warmth permeated through her suit. She'd finished the soup, but the heating element was still warm, and so she kept the packet in her hand, enjoying the heat.

She cast her mind back to the briefings that she read back on the ship, while Garret tinkered with whatever he was fixing next to her. She remembered the smell of his hair, and the way he made stupid jokes about everything...

She shook her head.

The day length here is short, she thought. It's nineteen hours or so. That will be weird, coming from a twenty-four hour day on Fisher station. But I think that makes the days cooler and the nights warmer, because the air has less time to cool down and warm up. However, I think it makes it windier, because it's rotating quicker? I wish I'd listened properly in those briefings.

Then, the sun is cooler and more orange than Fisher's sun, and much cooler and oranger than Sol. The gravity is a little lower, too, although I've not really noticed that. A cooler sun means we're orbiting closer to it, and that means more solar radiation, but my suit hasn't been going crazy, so the magnetosphere must be up to scratch. Oh, crap, but a stronger magnetosphere and more radiation means yet more radio interference. This planet really, really doesn't want me to talk to anyone, does it?

She looked up at the sky, wondering if she'd see the little white dot whizz past again. As she stared up, a group of black spots appeared on the eastern horizon, flying straight towards her.

Drones, maybe?

They weren't going particularly quickly, but then, if they were searching, maybe they wouldn't.

Odd that there's a group, though, she thought. I wonder...

Her helmet had a magnifying function, so she pulled it on, and tapped the wrist console. The blobs enlarged, sharpened, and she gasped at what she saw.

They were creatures. They were huge, maybe a dozen metres in length and width, dark brown against the grey sky. They seemed to be held aloft by a pair of long leathery balloons, one on either side of their torso, and they steered with fins which protruded from around their bodies. They had huge open mouths, like basking sharks. They cruised through the air sedately, changing direction with languorous fin flips. And, now they were closer, she could hear their song: slow, low, as stately and majestic as their movements. She watched them, amazed.

And of course, they were feeding. Now the rain had stopped, tiny black bugs flew up from the trees around her, dancing in the sky. The balloon animals swooped down, scooping the bugs up in their cavernous mouths, singing all the while. One flew only a few metres above her head; she gasped as a dozen primitive eyes along its flank rippled closed and then open again. Then, with a puff of air from a rear vent, it soared back up into the sky, rejoining its family.

She watched them as they shrank back into dots, following the rain clouds.

What an amazing planet, she thought. And it has large animals, too! Incredible.

I have maybe four hours of daylight left, I think. I need a shelter. I need warmth. I have my tent, I have my sleeping bag, but honestly, I have no idea how cold it gets, so I need to find some way of protecting myself against that. At least for the first few nights, anyway.

A fire would be nice, frankly. So would a roof over my head.

The capsule doors had been blown to either side of the crater. She walked over and dragged them back. She had no idea what they were made of, but they were light and strong. They might be useful.

If I sit in that crater, and it keeps raining, I'll wake up in a pond, she thought. No thanks. Okay, so I need to sleep somewhere else.

The largest cleared area was in front of the capsule, where the braking thrusters had burned hard. Here there was about ten metres of flattened or partially flattened trees, which was a start, but she couldn't sleep on those. The tent would need properly flat ground – and anyway, lying on those metal wires would be unpleasant.

She spent an hour and a half dragging away branches and leaves, clearing as much as she could down to the soil below, with breaks to get and purify more water and pour it in a jerry can. There were a few stumps which she couldn't do anything about, but she managed to rig up the tent between them. Then, using branches and the pod doors, she put a simple lean-to up. It didn't look particularly beautiful, but it was better than nothing.

The metal branches were very useful for this: either rod straight or gently curved, they were strong and easy to work with. She had no way to fix anything to anything else, though, so it was all somewhat precarious. However, with a small tarp under it all, she now had a little dry area that she could put things on.

As she worked, she was visited twice more by groups of the flying animals, which she'd decided to call gulpers. It was hard to tell if they were curious, or just taking advantage of the cloud of little bugs which flew above her.

Either way, it occurred to her that even though they didn't seem to be a threat, they were carnivores. And if animals had evolved to eat other animals, there might be more dangerous things out there. So, she took a branch with three nasty thick metal spikes sticking from one end, and she laid it next to the tent.

The sun was lower now. The work had tired her, but it had also taken her mind off Garret and the ship. So, when she started her next task, that of digging a latrine, she was startled when her suit beeped.

She glanced down at her wrist console. It was a message – or it would have been if the signal was strong enough. The console was smart enough to figure out that it had a failed attempt at communication, though.

She glanced up. Sure enough, the little dot was passing over her, high in the sky.

Next time that damn thing comes over, she thought, I want to know what it's trying to say. Aerial time.

Well, I'm not short of metal, am I?

She put down the little spade, and picked up the thinnest branch she could find. She ran her knife along its length, and teased out the threads of metal. It was like wire, flexible and strong. She kept going until she had a couple of dozen of the things, of varying thicknesses and lengths. Then, she plaited three together, deliberately choosing different sized ones. When she was close to the end of the shortest one, she picked another thread at random, and plaited that in, so that the braid kept going. She tried to wrap thinner wires around the outside of it, although they didn't hold so well. However in about three quarters of an hour she had a two metre long strand of braided wire. It was fragile, but not unworkably so.

This is good, but I really need like chewing gum or something, she thought.

She picked up one of the branches which she'd stripped the metal from. The flesh was spongy and bright green; it didn't feel like wood, more like a dense fruit. She squeezed it, and juice ran from it, green and smelling of citrus and pine.

She sliced off a two inch long chunk, and put it in her sonic pot, and kicked off its analyse mode.

Then she hunted over her suit, and found the port which was designed for the antenna. The suit makers had obviously envisioned a world where the wearer walked with it, because it looked like it was designed to sit on top of the backpack, given the socket was in the base of her helmet.

Well, that makes sense, she thought. I bet the aerial in the pack was like a mini dish or something, but I've just got a length of home-knitted organic cable, which isn't going anywhere. Okay.

She draped the aerial of her tent and lean-to, and wedged one end into the port on the helmet. She set it to listen, and went back to digging her latrine.

#

Half an hour later she'd finished digging her latrine pit, and the sun was noticeably lower in the sky. The sonic pot had finished its analysis: the plant was edible, although it needed to be disinfected like the water, but it had an incredibly high iron content. So much so, that if she had more than around half a kilo of the stuff she'd exceed safe consumption limits.

Oh Medea, Medea, she thought. You are beautiful, but you are very, very weird, and you really want to kill me, don't you?

Against that, the plant was actually rather nice, tasting as citrusy as it smelt; although she was constantly picking out little metal fibres, as if they were fish bones. She washed it down with another packet of dried food. She looked at her store of them: five days, at most.

Damn.

She ate sitting down in front of her tent, watching the sky. The clouds strolled from horizon to horizon, great streaks of white pulled by the high-altitude winds. The gulpers had flown high up, and were just little black dots, circling and chasing each other.

I bet they can't ever land, she thought. They're like sharks, never stopping, because their anatomy won't let them. They're true creatures of the air. I have no idea if I saw three family groups, or one group which split up, or, like, some really angry nationalist factions who hate each other. They are so different to me that I have no way of empathising with them. For all I know the little black things they eat are them in larval form.

She stretched her legs and then massaged her calves. The suit and gloves were thick, and the ache stayed in her muscles, unsatisfied by this clumsy attempt to relax them.

I wonder if I could take this off, she thought. You know what: I'm not going to. I don't know what else wants to eat me.

Her helmet, a few feet away, beeped twice, quiet but still audible in the silence. She looked down at the console on her wrist.

A message. She read it, twice. It made no sense.

'This is the Bright Orb. Thea, If you get this, respond on this private channel. Please don't reply in the open. I'll send this message every minute for the next week.'

What the fuck?

Chapter Three

'Hey, Orb. It's me. I'm alive and well on the planet, although I'm not sure how to tell you where I am. What's happened? Is everything okay?'

Her voice shook as she spoke into the mic, but the suit understood well enough, and flashed the response back up. She looked up: sure enough, there was the little dot, flying across the sky, far above her. It was moving so, so fast...

The response bleeped back.

'Thank goodness you're alive, Thea. Everyone's alive and fine here, but I don't understand what's happened to you. I have footage of your capsule ejecting and exploding, but when I examined it closely, it looked doctored. Something strange is going on. I'm worried about you. I'm doing this on a private channel because someone here has done this, and I don't know who. But, I can see you, and I know where you are.

'Now, this is important: we haven't made landfall yet. We're not sure where and when to. This planet is pretty dangerous: it's not what we were expecting. And, I can see something coming your way. I don't know what, but it's moving down the valley you're in. It will be there in a few hours. You have to move, now, to higher ground.'

And that's it. I'm so sorry. There is no more. Maybe I will work on this, and finish it? Let's see. But thank you for reading!