"I'll come with you," Jalina said finally. "Someone needs to make sure you don't do something stupid."
"Too late for that. I signed up for Liberty, didn't I?"
She almost smiled. Almost. Then the moment passed and she was standing up, moving to prep our gear for the nightly run.
I closed my eyes and let myself have exactly thirty seconds of weakness. Thirty seconds to remember Earth, to remember the life I'd left behind. The failed engagement I'd been running from. The environmental engineering job that had felt like a slow death. The way I'd seen the Liberty mission advertisement and thought:Yes. This. Something new. Something different.
Careful what you wish for, some wiser part of me whispered.
When I opened my eyes again, Elena was standing at the cave entrance, silhouetted against the slowly darkening sky. She was watching the horizon the way she always did, looking for something that wasn't there.
I pushed myself to my feet and joined her, because that's what we did. We kept each other from disappearing into the dark places in our own heads.
"Anything?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
"Nothing. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before."
The sky was doing its sunset thing. Okay, I'd give this planet this much: it had spectacular sunsets. Purple and orange and deep crimson, like the atmosphere was on fire. Beautiful and deadly, just like everything else here.
"Three more hours," I said.
"Then what? We run around in the dark, hoping we don't trip over something that wants to eat us?"
"That's the plan."
"It's a shit plan, Dana."
"Got a better one?"
Elena turned to face me, and there was something in her expression I couldn't quite read. Fear, maybe. Or resignation. "No. I don't have a better plan. I don't have any plan. I had one job, pilot us to safety, and I failed."
"The wormhole wasn't your fault."
"Wasn't it? I was at the controls. I should have?—"
"What? Out-flown physics we don't understand? Anticipated a cosmic event no one saw coming?" I grabbed her shoulder, made her look at me. "We survived. That's what matters. We're alive, and as long as we're alive, we keep moving forward."
She nodded, but I could see she didn't believe it. Not really. None of us believed it. We just said it often enough that it felt like the truth.
The temperature was dropping fast now, the way it always did when the sun started its descent. In another hour, we'd be able to venture outside without fear of our skin peeling off. Another hour of waiting, of existing in this liminal space between burning day and dangerous night.
I went back to check the beacon one more time, because checking the beacon was something I could control. The numbers hadn't changed. It was still broadcasting, still drainingour power reserves, still screaming into the void with no way of knowing if anyone was listening.
"Contact in T-minus thirty minutes," I called out, using the old mission terminology that felt like a lifetime ago. "Everyone gear up."
The cave became a flurry of controlled motion. Women pulling on salvaged gear, checking makeshift weapons, preparing for another night of desperate foraging. We'd gotten good at this, I had to admit. We'd developed routines, systems, a rhythm to our survival that was almost professional.
Almost.
I was strapping on my own pack when the cave entrance suddenly blazed with light, not the fading purple-orange of sunset, but white-hot and impossibly bright, like someone had turned on a spotlight that could illuminate planets.
"What the—" Elena's voice, sharp with surprise.
I spun around, hand instinctively reaching for the improvised weapon at my belt. Through the cave entrance, lights brightened in the sky. Massive lights. Descending lights.
My heart kicked into overdrive, adrenaline flooding my system with such force I actually staggered.
"Ship," someone breathed. "That's a ship."
