Daiko sat in an antique coms room, scrolling through the ship’s command code on a cracked analog screen. The script told half a story and Daiko, for the better part of a month now, was trying his best to make sense of it. What else was there for him to do?

  For reasons he couldn’t determine, the freighter made an unexpected landing in the asteroid belt, meaning they now were adrift somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Everyone on board, save for several members of his crew, had not survived the landing.

  Within a few days of waking up, he’d found a roster for passengers and crew on the flight, and after hours of sifting through the wreckage he identified the dead, or deemed them missing, including one of Christian’s escorts.

  Nearly every day he sat here, at the center console in the coms room, combing through historical commands one function at a time. Today, he attempted to piece together a picture of the landing. Minutes before impact, while he and the crew were in cryo, the flight deck sealed itself off from the rest of the ship—an auto-protocol when a crash was imminent. The hangar was one of only a few rooms to maintain structural integrity. It spoke to the ship’s design that whatever landing the captain attempted had preserved this section, though he didn’t know yet if that was a blessing or a curse.

  He noticed a command he didn’t recognize which followed the flight deck being sealed. He opened the master manual on his lap, an all too familiar sidekick in the aftermath of his waking. Each page of the index had been shed of the dust collecting there for decades. He ran his hand down the pages, slowing as he approached the corresponding sequence.

  “Manual override…bridge entryway.”

  The command, or button in this case by the looks of it, had been pressed a dozen times in the minutes before the crash.

  At the same time, another command repeated itself, each instance tagged with a unique identifier. Daiko flipped through the manual and saw each identifier corresponded to a section of the ship.

  “So,” he muttered, pointing at the first code. “One of you panicked and tried to escape… while the other meticulously secured the rest of the ship.”

  Daiko remembered Captain Kit. The man wasn’t a soldier, but he had seemed capable enough. His comrade though, one Ronald Peezly, might have panicked in trying to get out of the flight deck. But one hundred eighty seconds before impact, the computer had locked it down automatically. No one could get out then—not even with a stick of dynamite.

  It was all conjecture, of course. With no one to barter ideas—not anyone unfrozen, anyway—he had little else to do but sleuth.

  He navigated to the camera records next, where he’d begun the painful reboot of the storage banks. Weeks of waiting, and it was only two percent recovered. He found that he could make it run faster, but that would cause a power outage elsewhere in the ship, and he hadn’t yet learned which circuits were triggering it.

  Sliding his teeth along the plastic casing, Hitori squeezed the last drop of space goo from a nutrition packet. He made a notch on the notepad which recorded his food stores before tossing it in the recycle bin.

  Maintenance of the Razorback had helped him settle into a routine, distracting him from the desolation of being on an asteroid in the void, but it was beginning to require less of his attention each day—he’d always been a miser for efficiency.

  It was only after the immediate threat of death had passed that the spells of displacement began—periods of temporal unawareness appearing at will.

  It reminded him of the time he’d been stranded in the moonscape swells following a battle with the Geos. Those green gaseous rings that surrounded Jupiter had a way of dilating time. A lone meck might have the capacity to travel between the individual nodes floating in the swells, but navigation was impossible. You just had to find a node that had a hospitable and predictable environment, then wait.

  When he was finally found six days later, he was convinced it had been something like three weeks. Time had returned to him in the Razorback, once again donning the mantle of mischievous companion.

  Hunger helped stave his wandering thoughts, for when he finally created homeostasis in the Razorback, maintaining and projecting food stores was yet another task to distract him. Though that too began to fade when he found a large store of nutrition packs—basically tubes of chunky syrup—enough for one person to survive a very long time. Lucky me.

  That word, lucky, echoed in his head often. Lucky he chose the right pod, and found the nutrition packs… Lucky the Razorback’s hull remained largely intact. Oh and the water processors, oxcellerators, gravwells… Lucky. Lucky. Lucky.

  He’d known luck like this before. When his wingmates were sliced clean in two during full charge by a Transer’s light blades, but you survived. It was strange what people said to reassure him…he’d never once considered how fortunate he was while watching a friend’s top half be separated from its bottom in the vacuum of space.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He thumbed through his notebook, searching for the next clean page. When your life—your very survival—came down physically tracking thoughts and metrics alike, he found humor in wondering whether he’d run out of food or things to write on first.

  “The radio signal is still weak—can’t tell if anything is getting out.” He began speaking aloud in the first few days, a habit he was trained to pick up when marooned to stay sane, for a while at least…

  “Still no confirmation of mayday calls from the bridge leading up to impact…but could’ve been sent from elsewhere. Unfortunately rescue seems to be our only hope…”

  His voice seemed to echo off the walls more and more recently. He’d begun to respond to it naturally.

  “They’ll come looking…”

  “Sure, when we overshoot our docking date a month from now. Then where will we be?”

  He wasn’t sure what part of him was the optimist in any given argument, yet discussions with himself seemed to always stray back to the crew, those still alive.

  Daiko checked their vitals daily, Mina’s multiple times a day, and they seemed perpetually healthy. Cryo kept the person suspended, hardly above death, but it meant it didn’t need sustenance, not like his own. As he thought it, he swore he could feel his own body shriveling.

  On several occasions he nearly woke them—but each time, he held back. At first it was because he wanted to ensure the freighter was safe. That done, he wanted to determine how far their rations would take, and so plotted permutations of one or all of the crew being woken up—it was a depreciating value, but at least he wouldn’t be alone…

  But then he would consider their circumstances. What would they actually accomplish? He’d already determined that escape was impossible, and came to the same conclusion each time: waking them would be an act of selfishness, a desire—strong as it may be—to simply avoid suffering the loneliness.

  And there were other reasons too, but none were very optimistic. The fact of the matter was their chances of survival were greater if they remained in stasis.

  In the end, logic always won, but his darker thoughts were becoming more convincing with each day….

  Days. Weeks. Months. A year. He had only to look at his logs to know for sure, but it had become more a practice of doing than knowing. Higher functioning thoughts began to unravel like the makeshift cloak he wore, fashioned out of the tinfoil blankets.

  Now and again he rehashed the pros and cons of waking the crew. His arguments were becoming more crafty, some envisioning a reality where the solution to their survival would become clear only when all together…

  He once caught himself with a finger above Mina’s control panel, as though waking from a dream suddenly to find yourself standing beside the bed instead of on it. He laughed it off hysterically, and wagged a disapproving finger at the panel as he backed away.

  The conflict grew theatrical when he began journaling the dialogue, page after page, hour after hour. In hindsight, perhaps it was unwise to delineate these outspoken thoughts of his—almost people themselves at this point.

  There lived an anarchist inside him who was particularly unsettling. A pessimist loitered as well, and though he was a a torture to be around, he was better company than the anarchist. He hardly recognized his own voice anymore, the logical part of him that was trying its best to ply reason onto this desolate situation.

  The pods, he told himself, could last decades. Longer, if he could find a way to stretch the freighter’s emergency systems.

  “I should spend time extending those systems.”

  “Perhaps. But at this point, wouldn’t a clean death be better? Painless, unknowing.”

  “I’d know.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the crew…”

  Daiko turned his head to the side, facing the echo with indignation.

  “And if I’m dead, who would save them?”

  “For Schr?dinger’s sake, it wouldn’t be your problem.”

  He shook his head, then deflected, that worked in the past. “No. No. I’m not done yet. Keep the ideas coming though, bad ideas need…they need…” What was that saying of his?

  “It’s been over a year. You’re toiling. What else could you possibly do?”

  “I don’t know, but we came all this way for a reason.” Didn’t we?

  “Your reasons didn’t involve being marooned on an asteroid. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Maybe that was true, he’d certainly toiled his time away. Had it really been over a year? He stared at the walls of the hangar, seeing them for what they were: bastions, keeping out the black and hungry void beyond. Suddenly the light-starved walls began to change.

  The long shadows became mouths with black teeth, and to his ears came a host of unintelligible ideas, cawing at his mind like a murder of crows.

  “The war…”

  “No, not the war—more...”

  “An end.”

  “A means to an end.”

  A shimmering heat permeated the air as though he was dropped in front of a blazing bonfire. He leaned back, hands flying upward to shield his face from being seared alive.

  Though his hands burned, he remained conscious, and so peered through his fingers to find the source. He traced the heat by degrees to a mass secured to the wall. I seemed to wait patiently for him to draw near.

  “Of course...”

  “That's why I’m here, why I came all this way.”

  He stared at the meck pod the way an older version of himself would have—deconstructing it layer by layer with shrewd clarity, penetrating ideas of yesterday. A truth lay within its design, buried beneath a superfluous briar of mortal ideas—well intentioned but mortal all the same. No longer. He sheared the paradigm as Michelangelo once did to the simple stone block that would become David.

  “I can do better”

  “I know.”

  “And the crew?”

  He couldn’t answer that question, not yet, for he had no answers, and not knowing was what was killing him. What did he know? That’s what mattered, and he’d have to trust to figure out the rest along the way.

  He felt pain in his knees, and he realized he was kneeling before the meck pod. He’d gone somewhere just now, but had returned himself. The gasping darkness of the walls had departed for now, but it left the hangar with more dimension—more color—than it had before.

  Standing, he regarded the meck within the pod.

  “We agreed to do the impossible. It’s high time we get started.”

  At that moment he was reminded of Harold Van Met III…of what it must’ve been like to see the Geos Quint invading the skies above Alma Prime. Daiko finally understood what most people believed, but likely never truly experienced…purpose as a force of nature. To be faced with a dying age, and be commanded to forge a new one…he remembered a line from Harold’s own accounting of the event and it crystallized in Daiko’s mind for the rest of his days…

  Forevermore the spark that lit the stars aflame…

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