Chapter Text
Alastair King is tired.
This is, of course, because she still insists on sticking to the timezone from her home country, even three thousand light-years out, even though she hasn’t been there in nine months - and according to that timezone, Phil and Techno are rushing her out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. Not for no reason, though, apparently.
“Come on,” Phil hisses, as she pulls her shoes on with fumbling hands, eyes still blinking their way out of sleep, “we’re gonna miss it!”
“Can’t I just wait for the next one?”
“Given that you’ve been travelling with us for two-fifty-odd years, Al, I don’t exactly think the next one is coming any time soon. Up with you.”
“I’m up, I’m up!”
She pushes up her glasses and tries to comb some sense into her mane of hair with carding fingers and untrimmed nails that scratch her scalp up. It’s been a hot minute since she spent any time on personal care - she’s been on a sleeping kick for the past month or two, six weeks, maybe. Techno tells her this is normal. She’s not so sure.
“Which deck?”
“Starboard,” Phil informs her, and then vanishes down the east corridor. All Alastair can really do is follow.
Though, to be fair, once she’s got her hands secured around the safety rail of the viewing deck, looking out on space, it does do its part to remind her of the glory of it all. The majesty. If she were going to wake up on any unfamiliar ship however many hundred years ago, she’s glad it was Phil and Techno’s, because this thing’s luxurious, and the viewing deck is massive.
“What am I looking at?”
“Oyston’s Comet,” Techno recites, “the first identified comet in this quarter to be composed primarily of rock with high copper-two content, burns green. It’s quite a sight. Orbits every seven-six-eight years. So, no, you can’t wait for the next one.”
She can see it now, actually, leaning over the rail - in the distance, a flash of green is etching itself onto her retinas, brighter than anything but fire. The light in the ship feels pitiful in comparison - some sunrise-emulating LEDs in weak orange, intended to make their waking up process smoother, but admittedly clunky at the heart of it. Nothing beats a real sunrise, as Phil always says.
If she could remember ever having seen one, she’d be inclined to agree.
“So. Cool comet. Are we taking notes? Samples? Research?”
“All of the above,” Techno nods. “The chemical analysis probe is gonna have to go in remotely, or else somebody would be incinerated, but we’re in exactly the right spot to get a good picture if we set up the camera apparata. And pictures of unorthodox comets sell for quite a lot to higher education organisations, so we’ll probably get in contact with a college when we can. Then we take a buffer, then we leak it, boom, moral integrity preserved.”
“I do love the leaks.” There’s always something a little magical about releasing gated information to the general public - although she isn’t quite sure of the legalities, especially not while they’re in interplanetary transit, it’s nonetheless lovely to know that all across the galactic network millions of people were receiving free information that was meant to have been kept behind a paywall. Besides, when had Phil and Techno ever cared about what was legal?
“So once we’re done here, which should be in a couple of hours, Phil’s gonna chart course to the nearest planetary mass and set us down to establish a better connection on the ground. We’re far out enough that it’s more likely to be societal than corporational.”
Alastair shudders. “I hope so.” The last time they landed on a division of Amazon wasn’t great for any of them. It took a good few months before they managed to use their twenty-minute breaks efficiently enough to get back to the ship and get the fuck out of there. Never again, she’d like to swear.
“Are you okay? You’re not talking much.”
“Yeah. Just tired.” She sets her eyes back on the burning flash of green that’s hurtling towards their landscape. It feels easier that way.
“You know if you stopped following Earth time, you’d feel better. We’re not built for 24 hours. We’re in space.”
“Maybe. I like it, though, it’s a comfort.”
It’s mainly because she doesn’t remember anything about her home planet other than the brief stint they spent there earlier in the year, two months on the ground, trading and building connections, picking up leads. All she knows is the ID card in her pocket, almost burnt and melted to scrap in the wreckage, displayed a name and a face and a flaking Union Jack in the corner, and that meant she was from Earth, from the UK, from somewhere even though when Phil and Techno dragged her into safety she’d known nothing else. It’s nice to think that maybe she’s got people on the planet who care about her, people who miss her - and people who, when she’s grumbling about how early it is, are looking at the same sunrise, but with the actual Sol.
“As long as it helps you sleep at night, Al. Whatever night is when you’re this far from the nearest star.”
“Thanks, Techno.”
They wait the three hours as the comet screams closer. Phil makes them coffee, Techno sets up camera rigging, Alastair scans her map for potential planets to head for after they’re done here.
“What about this one?” she asks, holding the holo-display up so Phil can see it.
“Looks good. Low-pop, breathable, safe zones mostly undeveloped because they're deserted, with what looks like a lot of flora on the far side. If we land by - spin it round a bit? -” she does “- if we land by the sort of cratered area over there we should be in a perfect spot to set up a signal tower.”
“Sounds alright to me.”
“I think we might have been here before, actually, there might already be a setup! That’d be helpful. D’you remember it?”
“I don’t think it was in my time,” she shakes her head, a little sheepish.
“Ah, alright then. We’ve certainly been going for long enough to make repeat visits.”
Alastair laughs and starts copying the details of the landing site’s coordinates into the ship’s computer. Luckily, by the time she’s finished doing that, and saved it as a new highlighted location for the autorouting protocol to find their path when they need it, Phil’s back to rushing her over to the viewing deck for the actual cross.
“Don’t forget your glasses!”
“Oh, shit,” he nods gratefully, and rushes right back for his protective eyewear. Alastair keeps hers in her back pocket most days - they’ve got a comforting feel to them. (Techno doesn’t make eye contact anyway, but she can feel that it’s a little hard for Phil to meet her gaze most days. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that he’s got 100% more pupils than her; she’s not exactly sure when that change occurred, but nobody commented on it, as far as she can remember. Once she’d asked him about it, and he’d clarified that his wife was the same. Given that Alastair had never met Phil’s wife, and it had been two and a half centuries, she’d elected to wear the glasses more often instead of asking questions.)
The comet begins to pass through their line of filming, and the LEDs on the ship’s roof drop out row by row until they’re standing in green-tinted vaccuum blackness. “It is beautiful.”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t think it’d be so bright, it’s like an emerald or something.”
“I don’t have much experience with gemstones,” she comments - not that I recall, at least.
“That’s fair enough. I don’t think I’ve actually seen, like, a ruby in a good century - but I’ve got my diamond ring, and Tech and I - well. Shouldn’t go into that, actually. But no, I don’t either, as far as I remember.”
“At least you remember,” Alastair cracks.
Phil pauses. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“No, no, don’t worry, it’s fine,” she laughs, before he’s got a chance to go feeling sorry for her. “We have to laugh about it, right?”
“If that’s what makes you comfortable.”
“I’d rather make jokes than mourn.”
“Alright then. I know it’s tough.”
Alastair doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns her head back to the cross of the comet, which is about a thousandth of a light-second’s distance from their spacecraft, or several hundred kilometres away. It’s big enough that getting much closer would probably end up getting them damaged in some way, but they can still see it from this far away, and still get good pictures with Techno’s cameras.
It’s beautiful.
And there’s something about it that -
Is she about to sneeze?
And then it’s gone, and all she’s left with is the lingering trail of a green flash-light across the nonexistent horizon, and the clunk of machinery behind her as the ship lights up again.
Techno drops down from the hatch above them. “Got ‘em!”
“That’s brilliant, mate,” Phil nods encouragingly. “I’ll check the chemical scanners, or I’ll get one of you two on the job and speed up the planetary contact process?”
“I can take logging duty,” offers Alastair.
“Oh, would you, Al? That’d be fab.”
“No problem at all.” She’s always (as far as she can remember) liked the permanence of writing things down, of keeping a record. She thinks, in another life, that she might have been a museum curator, or something of the sort, back on earth. The way this manifests on the ship is that whenever it’s her turn to write the logs, she puts almost too much detail into every entry, making every facet of an event into a memory - Phil calls it flowery, Techno calls it unnecessary. (Neither of them read them back, she suspects.) Superfluous details are, she likes to argue, just part of the package when it comes to working with her.
“I’m gonna get a head start on sleep, then,” Techno rolls their eyes and moves to head back to their quarters. “And I’d advise you do the same when you’re done, Al. It’s gonna be another few hours before we can land.”
“Roger that, Techno,” she nods.
Logging the chemical analysis data is pretty easy - it’s mostly numbers, element names, things that she can’t really do anything about other than transfer into their appropriate textboxes and then be mildly interested by the percentage figures the machine spits out. But once she’s done with that, the verbal logs await her; the unassuming, translucent, glass-based canvas of her true night’s work. She’ll never quite be sure when technology stopped needing to have backs, beyond a nebulous sense of “that’s what it was like on Earth”, something which apparently managed to stick in her memory even when things like her occupation or the company she’d once kept elude her.
LOG 96136
ALASTAIR KING
Comet cross successfully documented. Photography executed without error - files to be uploaded ASAP, when we establish a tower connection to the internet on the nearest planet. Copper content anomalous but not dangerous to potential carbon-based life if introduced to a relevant environment; substantial content of calcium carbonate also tracked. Base camp on the planet (Vesta-35b) expected to cap at 3 days, but stocked for a maximum of 2 weeks allowing for travel to the nearest refuel/restock point.
I must admit, I find it hard to put myself to sleep tonight. The image of that comet’s bright green aura soaring past us has, I might say, burned itself into my retinae. It’s difficult to forget such a beautiful and unique sight, is it not?
It’s something about the green. Bright green. I’d swear it on my past, whatever that might have been. The green light is the thing that’s tripping me up. But how so?
Perhaps it feels familiar. Whatever that means, too; I couldn’t venture so far as to diagnose myself. Maybe when we send off our data I’ll come to understand myself a little better on that front.
Alastair bolts upright when she feels the ship land. It’s been about nine hours since she lay down, and she’s spent approximately… three or four of them actually sleeping. The rest of them were preoccupied with a mixture of thought and thoughtless playback of the comet’s cross. She’s glad she got so much sleep in for the past few months, then - this is time she’s now cashing in to spend sitting awake and wondering about the meaning of her brain’s attachments. Everything balances out in the end, she supposes.
Either way, they’ve arrived on Vesta-35b, as she’s able to discern from the view outside once she’s up, dressed, and heading for the door. She slips the sunglasses on again - this planet’s atmosphere is a little thinner than the air concentration in the ship usually stands at, although it’s perfectly safe and breathable for humans, and that means she’s a little wary of the blinding power of the star they’re orbiting on her vision - and manages to catch the other two doing much the same on the other side of the gallery.
“Good morning,” she greets.
“Mornin’,” is Techno’s response.
“Fun thing about this planet, actually,” Phil grins, instantly excited to share his wisdom with the class. “So this bit’s a habitable zone, yeah, good air, good lifeforms, minimal dust storms - you don’t wanna see the other side of the place!” He chuckles. “How- ever, that actually comes with a bit of an interesting tradeoff; the days are about four hours long, and the nights are the other twelve hours of the rotation. And you don’t wanna be out at night unless you’re made of metal, because of the low temps - which means that if you wanna explore, we’re gonna have to get cracking on it, yeah?”
“Alright then!”
And so they head out, picking a random direction and sticking with it, learning the lay of the land as they go. When he said dust storms he’d been telegraphing a realisation that Alastair comes to very quickly; this place is primarily desert, which, she supposes, works well for a planet where the habitable zone only gets light about a quarter of the time, and who knows how the rain works. (Phil knows. He’s only too happy to tell her.) The flora they do find is small and inoffensive, purple-black plantlike organisms designed to soak up more light in a thinner atmosphere, hesitant protrusions of surface area with top-heavy structures making these plants look like nothing she’d expect to see.
Which is funny, because considering she has very little memory of time on Earth, and no memory of time outside the inner cities of Earth, she should have no basis to “expect” anything from - but, nevertheless, this is the way it shakes out.
“I don’t think that’s how the sky’s meant to look,” Techno comments, about an hour into their venture.
And, “Really?” she asks, looking up to check.
Oh. He’s right, actually. She doesn’t think the sky is meant to look like that.
“That’s -” a frown immediately colours Phil’s tone “- is that a fucking meteor shower?”
“Could be.”
“Right. Turn around. Back to base camp, we’re gonna have to hole in until I can get a forecast on how long that’s gonna be on for. We can’t set up the signal tower if we’re getting bombarded with massive chunks of rock for the next few days.”
So back they turn, picking their way back across the alien desert to find the ship again, and all the while the faint dashes across the sky start to turn from decorative to real, infrequent chunks of rock gently landing either side of them like hailstones as they go. Nothing’s big enough to actually hit them, but it still puts caution into Alastair’s step as she goes, with her hands about an inch above her head in a more-performative-than-anything protective stance. (Something actually hits and glances off of one of her fingers when they’re about to reach the doors, which is… not promising.)
The news is no better when they’re safe inside and Phil manages to check the relevant data they’ve got on hand. “Not a meteor shower, but we are getting a shower of sorts - this happens sometimes; basically, there’s gonna be a hail of space debris for the next… however long. We’re not in any danger - should even be able to go out in it and probably not sustain any blunt force head trauma from Rock To The Brain - but we can’t set up the tower, and we definitely can’t take off in this… weather.”
“Oh, shit,” Alastair mutters.
“In short, we’re starred in for the foreseeable future.”
“So, uh…” Techno’s eyes flick between his crew and the window. “What do we do?”
“If you could send out a radio signal - not a mayday, just an informant - then if it gets any worse at least somebody’ll know where we are. We’ve been to this planet before, according to the computer, so we should be fine for the long haul.” By rule they blacklist hazardous planets as inaccessible. “Beyond that? Honestly I’d say our best bet is to sleep it off. Get up every few days, check on the weather, and we’ll get on with our upload once we’re not being bombarded with tiny rocks. Are we alright with that?”
“Sure.”
“Shame we can’t get wifi,” she laments, “Netflix would be a godsend right about now.”
Phil hums his agreement before turning back in the direction of his sleeping quarters. “Right. I’m gonna set up. I hate to sleep so much in such a short space of time, but - well, there’s not much to be done about it, is there? We’ll make up for it next month, I suppose. Who wants to go on another hundred-hour research expedition when we get the fuck out of here?”
“I’m up for it!”
“Sure, why not,” says Techno, and they move to get the radio going.
Alastair, for her part, gets ready to put herself to sleep with remarkable efficiency. She picks out new clothes, cleans her teeth, and is settled in by the time their first night on Vesta-35b falls. Phil’s sat on the sofa in their central sitting area when she walks past him and towards bed; he’s holding a mug of something that’s probably tea. (Well, Phil has a chaotic definition of tea which includes but is not limited to soup, the contents of a washing machine and the ocean, so whatever Alastair would call it, tea is probably still accurate in Phil’s opinion.)
“Goodnight,” she offers.
“Sleep well,” he returns.
But she can’t, as it turns out, sleep at all. It’s probably her own insistence on adhering to an Earth sleep schedule for so many years, but according to the clock her body’s running on, it’s actually supposed to be about nine o’clock in the morning right now, and that means that she’s ready for another day’s worth of productivity. No matter what the schedule, or the weather, says about it.
She makes it to roughly midday before she’s too hungry to keep trying to sleep, at which point she heads to the kitchen and grabs a nutritional bar. They’re supposed to go to all of the effort of unfreezing or rehydrating regular meals while they’re out here, and save the snacks for emergencies, but she’s decided that this counts - what else that they’ve been through as a crew before has been much more serious?
(Disregarding the whole thing with Auriston-16 a few decades ago. That was definitely one for the books and the snack bars.)
Once she’s eaten, Alastair makes an effort to spruce up the ship - she vacuums up the dust and neatens the shelves, lined with strange things and tokens that they’ve managed to pick up over the years, some of them items she couldn’t possibly put a name to if she were held at gunpoint. This crew’s been through a lot together, she realises with a smile, and goes back to tidying. But once everything’s neat, and the ship’s still quiet but for the whistling of the cold winds outside their regulated living space, and she realises just how enormously alone they are out here, it suddenly feels much more palatable to go back to bed and wait it out.
Still doesn’t make it any easier to sleep when her brain’s telling her it’s not even dinnertime yet.
The first sprinklings of dawn are starting to scatter themselves across this planet’s orange-brown horizon when Alastair gives up and puts on her expedition clothes. It still looks like the debris in the sky is safe to walk in; she’s fairly sure that a good majority of it’s being burnt up into harmless specks by the time it actually gets to her head six-feet-however-much off the ground. She’s still wearing a hat, just to keep her hair clear (these curls take a LOT of shampoo, okay?)
Going out alone is definitely scarier than “yesterday’s” trip with the three of them. There’s a constantly pervading… worry, more than anything, that something bad will happen, even though so far she’s spent a good few hours in this environment and not seen anything more dangerous than a particularly spiky not-cactus and some currents carrying sand and dust that whip around her shins in a child’s-play version of what she’s been told is going on around the globe from here. She picks a direction (north) and follows it, wondering if she’ll make it to the pole, and quickly finding that this planet’s small enough that within two hours’ journey the climate has already changed and she’s absolutely not dressed for this. Just as well, because the days are four hours long, right? Alastair’s got to head back now, while this planet’s sun is at its peak above her, or else she’ll get caught in the even worse cold that comes with being out at night, and if she was shivering at the northern temperatures, she’ll definitely freeze once there’s no starlight to warm her in Vesta-35b’s thin air. The trek back gets easier every time, she thinks with no proof; maybe she’s just learning the lay of the land, tracking it into her memory like her feet track sole marks into the dust, because, now that she thinks about it, she really hasn’t seen a water source around here this whole time. That’s probably why there’s no animals - the only water these plant things get, if they get it, must be the rain.
No animals and no colonies.
And that, Alastair decides, once she’s back home and safe in the ship, is something she’d like to add to the logs.
LOG 96137
ALASTAIR KING
Two expeditions on the planet’s surface were conducted. The first involved all three crewmates, the second was a solo mission. Observational evidence was gathered on the nature of the planet’s sedimentary formations and non-sentient life; chemical analysis data can be collected at further request, but since the potential facilitators of such a request are currently otherwise occupied, data will stay observational until further notice. Climate is concentrated on this planet; hypothesis states that travelling too far south will render the environment inhospitably hot.
Stocks holding. No technological malfunctions reported.
I’ve got a bad feeling about the next short while. I’m rather apprehensive about the concept of just… sitting down and sleeping for a week until the debris showers clear up. Plus, from what we’ve already seen - well, I don’t seem to be particularly good at the sleeping for several days aspect of things, do I? Seems like my fatigue from the last few months has finally caught up with me, and at the worst possible time for it to do so.
But what harm can it do for me to go exploring in my time alone? It’s a nice planet, in my opinion, if a little dry. I’m more than likely to head out again tomorrow. And maybe I
will
bring a chemical analysis probe, just to see.