Everyone in attendance was staring at the empty casket being lowered into the hole dug into the frozen ground of early January. Weylan shuffled his notes, clearing his throat before speaking, “Our space program was lucky to have an astronaut like Aelin Galathynius. She gave her life to this program and will be sorely missed. Her sacrifice in the furthering of science itself will not be in vain and the men and women here at TNSB will notice her absence every second of every hour, ensuring that her death means something. Anneith bless her and Hellas save her,” he said, making the sign of protection and prayer, a three fingered claw-like shape and pushing it from his heart.

The attendees repeated the gesture while Manon and Asterin whispered their own prayers, holding hands tightly, designating the highest Ironteeth honour on the fallen woman.

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Gavriel was already in Weylan’s office as he walked in with Asterin, the two locked in a hushed argument. Upon spying the mission director, they paused and Weylan nodded towards the folder in his hand, “What’s that there?”

“I need you to sign off on the plans for the-“

“No.”

Gavriel pressed harder, “I know I can get parliament to fund it-“

“Gavriel, that’s not why I said no and you know it.” Weylan sighed and walked past him to sit behind his desk, Asterin taking a seat beside Gavriel. “We’re a public organization, everything we do has to be transparent.”

“And?”

Weylan and Asterin shared a look before the director responded, speaking slowly, “The moment the satellites point to the hab, we broadcast Aelin Galathynius’ body to the world.”

Gavriel scoffed, “You’re afraid of a PR scandal?”

Asterin rose a brow, “Of course we are. We have a dead astronaut on Farnor and we still need funding for The Crone.”

“So then what do we do?” he asked, tapping his finger on the folder, “She’s not going to decompose, her body will be up there forever.”

The director shrugged, “Meteorology reports that she’ll be covered by sand in less than a year.”

Gavriel threw his hands up, nearly hitting Asterin in the process, “We can’t wait a year! We have work to do and are we not going to discuss retrieving her body?”

“And what? Waste money and time for a corpse?”

Both Asterin and Gavriel flinched, the former hiding her adverse reaction better than Gavriel did. He was at a loss for words, thankfully Asterin spoke up, “Weylan, think about it. The Crone can bring the body back. Sympathy for her family-“

“What family? She’s an orphan and unmarried.”

It took conscious effort to anger Gavriel and he clamped down on the red-hot emotion, gritting his teeth as Asterin spoke again, “The Crone can bring back her body. We don’t make the mission about that, but we make it clear that that’s part of it. I can spin it if we do this now, Weylan. We can’t wait a year – people won’t care in a year.”

  +*+*+*+*+*+*

The pain had lessened, if barely, as Aelin came to, not sure how’d long it had been since she’d passed out. There was no new blood and she sighed in relief, reaching for the pills again and taking one. Aelin stood up, pushing herself up carefully until she was standing.

She groaned but was able to breathe past the ache and hobble her way to the bunks, dragging out her box and getting warmer clothes.

Putting them on took energy, too much of it, and she was panting as she sat on the floor, her back against her bed. Her stomach panged in hunger and she would have to find something to eat soon, but first, she grabbed her laptop and moved to the kitchen, sitting down and opening the computer up.

After a few taps and a bit of fiddling, she clicked on the video journaling and the camera started rolling. “Fuck, I don’t know how to do this,” she muttered, glancing at herself on the screen before squaring her shoulders and taking deep breath. “Uh, hi. This is Aelin Galathynius, recording from the hab. It’s currently,” she looked at the timestamp next to the recording time, “sixteen-hundred hours and surprise, I lived!” She laughed shakily, dragging her hand through her hair. “Obviously.” 

“I’m assuming this is a surprise to the crew and TNSB, if not, I’m going to kick some asses, but… I did not die on day eighteen. If I’m piecing this all together correctly, this,” she held up the antennae, “lovely little thing here damaged my bio-monitor and the team… had to leave before someone else got hurt.” Tears filled her eyes and she wiped them away, “Stupid painkillers, making me cry. But I… if I don’t make it out of here, which is highly likely, I just want to tell my crew that I don’t blame you, ok?”

She let out a shaky breath and continued, “I know that you broody humans are going to blame yourselves, especially you, Commander, but it was a tough situation and I would’ve made the same call. It’s just my bad luck, you know?”

Aelin shook her head, “Alright, now that all the mushy stuff is out of the way, I need to do some science.” She grabbed a nearby pen and her mission file, “There’s no way to contact TNSB because the satellite broke and I was impaled by the antennae. The next manned mission is in four years and I have to survive on a desolate planet for that long, right? Oh, and get to the Mistward crater where a prepositioned FAV is just waiting.”

She chewed on the pen, brows furrowing as she thought, “It’s a thirty-one-day expedition which means we have provisions for seventy, as a precaution.” She scribbled some numbers down, her mind whirling, “Now, it’s just me here which means it’ll last for…” she trailed off, “three-hundred days. With rationing, I can stretch it to four hundred. Which means I don’t have enough provisions to make it.”

With a sly grin, she looked up at the camera, “Thankfully, I know a thing or two about botany and soil.”

Aelin pushed herself in the wheeled chair to the pantry, opening every drawer and carefully counting every packet they had, separating them into different piles.

One, marked with red letters, Do not open until Beltane caught her eye and she grabbed it, “Oh, thank fuck the only thing Terrasen can grow is potatoes.” She looked at the camera by the microwave, “I’m about to science the shit out of this. It’s not gonna be pretty, I need to reclaim our waste and make fertilizer, but… it’ll keep me alive.” For now.

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

It had been a week since the storm and Aelin had completed converted the kitchen into a greenhouse, Farnor soil on the floor, fertilized with the crew’s own human waste, with neat rows of spuds by moving all the chairs and tables outside, dumping them on the ground next to the rover station. That was another thing. To get to the next drop-site, it was a two-thousand-kilometre drive and the rover went a total of fifty.

Adding in the fact that she would have to spend the nights inside the rover as well, with outside temperatures reaching negative seventy-three in Celsius, she would need to turn on the heater, which would drain the battery.

She’d long since gone through everyone’s things, finding the holy grail, a rover manual in Lorcan’s box. Aelin had never been more thankful for mechanical engineering in her life.

It was slow and hard work to modify the two rovers they had. After fifty kilometres, the batteries would need to be recharged, at the hab.

Left with no other options, Aelin had been forced to dig up the old radioisotope thermoelectric generator, powered by none other than plutonium itself. The list of dangers was lengthy, however, Aelin wasn’t too worried.

She talked to the camera in the rover, “Now, I do remember that one of our lessons was ‘Don’t Go Digging Up The Big Box Of Plutonium,’ but it’s either cancer due to exposure or slowly dying due to the laws of thermodynamics. Honestly, at this point, getting cancer due to exposure to a toxic chemical would be heaven compared to being alone on a desolate planet, but them’s the breaks, I guess.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

The lone astronaut was sitting before the computer, wearing the hoodie Rowan had left. It was the only thing that brought her comfort, other than the motherload she’d found on Nesryn’s computer – all of the Twilight movies and, of course, the computer geek’s favourite manga, Anatolia Story. It was surprisingly interesting and after she’d binge read seven out of twenty-eight volumes, Aelin forced herself to stop, telling herself she’d only read one volume a week. So far, she’d kept to her promise, but she’d been so busy with figuring out how to stay alive, she hardly had any free time.

She did find enough time to laugh herself silly over the fact that Fenrys’ had every Disney princess movie available, even her favourite: Mulan.

Elide had been her saviour with PDFs of Harry Potter, and Lorcan with Marvel movies. Even grouchy Rowan had Grey’s Anatomy, which was quite a shock to find out, given how much the doctor looked down on the show. Sometimes, Aelin imagined his voice as he ranted about how dramatic and unrealistic it was, especially with how many of the doctors slept with their co-workers.

But now was not the time to think of such things, Aelin had work to do.

Last night, she had recorded, yet again, her random thought pattern, focusing on how she would water her crops, after having planting the spuds for Beltane. “Thank the gods that Elide was always a fucking weirdo and learned how to fabricate water at much too young, but hey, foster parents don’t pay that much attention. Well,” she chuckled, “they paid enough attention to stop her from ordering The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which is a good thing because that was a time when we were in one of our little spats,” which were really anything but little. “She was able to put together this handy-dandy thing.” She indicated the packet on the table, of various simple reactions including one very, very important one.

Water.

Aelin toyed with Elide’s evil eye symbol, “The thing is, to make water, we need fire, which seems a bit strange, why would one need fire for water? But anyway, TNSB is against fire because of the whole ‘fire in space makes everyone die’ thing. So, everything is fire-retardant. Everything,” she held up the evil eye, which happened to be made of wood, “except for El’s personal items.”

There was a small knife on the table and she picked it up, shaving off pieces of her sister’s carving, “Ellie, if you see this, I’m assuming you don’t mind that I went through your personal boxes – all of yours actually. Commander, and I mean this with no offence, but all you listen to is punk. I have nothing against punk, but after a while, it all sounds the same, you know? One guy yells, ‘one two three four’ and then the guitars and drumming starts!”

Eventually, she had a nice pile of wood shavings and she carefully carried them over to the middle of the room. She remembered to put on her mask before passing through the plastic tarp, where Aelin had set up a very rudimentary stove-esque set up.  The normally risky experiment was even more dangerous and she wasn’t going to blow herself up by forgetting to account for the oxygen she was exhaling.

“Ok,” she breathed out, putting the wood shavings on the sieve that covered the empty can of beans. Her eyes were wide, missing nothing. So many things could go wrong and Elide’s voice filled her head, There’s a reason people without chemistry degrees don’t make water. “I know that,” she bit out, her brows lowering as she carefully poured a few drops of rocket fuel – hydrazine – which was conveniently made of two sodium atoms bonded with four hydrogen atoms.

Carefully, so carefully, she struck the torch, wincing as the wood caught on fire, the flames fluttering happily. When nothing bad happened, she cheered and smiled beneath her mask, keeping one eye on the set-up and another on her spuds as she backed up into the kitchen, a slightly mad smile on her face as she sat down heavily on the chair and looked into the camera, “Don’t worry, guys, no explosions or fire, other than the very controlled experiment.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Aelin was hunched over a map, Iron Man: 3 playing idly on the laptop beside her. She was planning her route to the drop-site, which was in the Mistward crater. She breathed out and wiped the sweat from her brow.

Sweat.

Hardly daring to move, she turned to look at the plastic tarp of her greenhouse, seeing the drops of moisture on it. With a half-crazed laugh, she stood up and entered the closed off space, running her hand over the tarp, her fingertips coming away wet. “Water,” she breathed, buzzing with joy, “water! I have water!”

She raced to her bunk and threw on her suit and helmet, bouncing on her toes as she waited for the airlock tunnel to depressurize and then she raced to the water reclaimer, as fast as one could while wearing a spacesuit.

The sun beat down on her but she barely paid the heat any mind as she opened the water reclaimer, a dry sob tearing from her throat as she found it to be filled to the brim with the crystal clear liquid. 

For the first time since she’d woken up, Aelin felt hope, bright and beautiful hope. 

+*+*+*+*+*+*

It was past midnight in Perranth and Nox Owens yawned into his mug of tea, blinking hard to stay awake.

He settled back into his chair in Satellite Control, pulling up the aerial images of the hab for his boss. They took a while to load and he might have dozed off, jolting and nearly spilling his tea as the computer beeped, indicating the images were ready. With a slight sigh, he carefully put his mug down and pushed his glasses up after they had slipped down to the end on his nose yet again.

Blinking the sleepiness from his startlingly grey eyes, he clicked through the batch, making sure everything was normal before sending them up to his superiors. Something had him shifting in his wheelie-chair and narrowing his angular eyes, “What the fu…”

No. It couldn’t be. How in Hellas’ realm was the rover moving? The solar panels?

This didn’t make any sense…

Logically, the satellite planner knew that there was only one answer for this, he just couldn’t believe it.

Maybe he’d seen it wrong or these were old pictures, but the timestamp in the corner of the screen told him that what he was seeing was correct.

And that meant that… Aelin Galathynius was alive. And they’d left her on Farnor, alone.

Shit.

It took him a few tries to grab the phone and he couldn’t tear his eyes away as the operator picked up.

“This is Nox Owens from SatCon, I need to speak with Gavriel Aryeh. The Farnor Mission Director, yes. It’s an emergency.”

“Emergency, really?”

Nox hissed into the receiver, “Yes, it’s an emergency.”

+*+*+*+*+*+*

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