A truth was hidden somewhere on this planet, and Nadya was going to find it.
“How did we end up here?” she asked herself, as she was entering the drop pod .
“We boarded the Phoenix MK II spacecraft circling in Mars orbit twenty-nine days, ten hours and forty-seven minutes ago, extended our solar sails four hours after boarding and achieved a heliocentric velocity of two-hundred kilometers per second within thirteen minutes of sail extension. That is how we ended up here.” The on-board computer delivered the answer straight to her brain in the form of an auditory hallucination with a soft Glaswegian accent.
“Aidan, your rhetorical answers stopped being funny around nine decades ago. I swear – you do this one more time and I am switching you back to voice-control-only.” threatened Nadya half-jokingly. She had been working with the same IUI for almost a century and she knew the dance well.
“My humblest apologies, Commander. Hatch – sealed. Commencing suspension gel pressurization.”
The drop pod started quickly filling up with the thick, breathable liquid that would allow Nadya to survive the immense gravitational forces of uncontrolled atmospheric entry and subsequent impact with the surface.
“Hey, it smells like jasmine this time! Nice touch. I guess I can forgive your reprehensible behavior, but just this once.”
“I wanted to avoid a repeat of Ganymede , so I took the liberty of scanning your memories for a less… gag-inducing scent.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. I’m never eating pineapple again.”
The suspension gel had completely filled the hollow interior of the capsule and was starting to make its way into Nadya’s body, coating her lungs and enveloping her organs. She could no longer speak, so she used her neural link instead.
“When I was a rookie in the academy, they told me I would eventually get used to feeling like a fish tank during pod drops. This hasn’t been the case so far, but tenth time’s the charm, right?”
“I wouldn’t know, Commander. I have no data pertaining to the emotional state of aquariums.”
Nadya chuckled soundlessly. It was good, pretending that this was just another mission. Only this time, she would not be setting up a human habitat on a distant world. A lifetime had passed since she last set foot on Earth. A lifetime since she left her childhood behind, eager to touch the sky.
“How did we end up here?” she thought again. Her long journey was coming to an end and her mind kept going back to the events that had ultimately consumed her home world and almost every living soul on it.
“We can start from the environmental disasters of the 21st century. The Panama Split. The widespread adoption of machine intelligence. The proliferation of chemical and nano-technological body enhancements. The disappearance of the Moon. Please choose a topic for further information.” Aidan’s voice was unwavering.
“I’ll be going down that rabbit hole soon enough. Have you been able to detect any earthside communications? Any significant movement? Anything at all?”
“Nothing yet, Commander.” he replied. Nadya could swear he was mocking her restlessness.
“That will be all for now, Aidan. Take care of my baby, will you?” She had grown attached to her spacecraft over the years, and to the quasi-symbiotic relationship she had developed with its on-board computer.
“Affirmative. All systems go. Initiating launch countdown.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Fly true, Valkyrie.”
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We are Gergana Pishmanova and Kaloyan Zehirev, a wife-and-husband writing team! We were born in the distant land of Bulgaria towards the end of the second millennium. A couple of decades later, we met each other, got married and moved to the United States. Since then, we've been pursuing our shared passion for literature by reading books and publishing stories online.
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