Quoted By:
“Our coordinates are locked. The RAIN cuts forward thrust and pulses her cold-gas thrusters. Her slate-black hull slides through an orbital insertion window forty milliradians wide, chasing the shadow of MIZAR-III’s harvest moon.
Three hours left.
I walk through the RAIN’s corridors a final time, hearing the bell-echo of magnetized boot-heels on well-worn deck plating. I cherish the moisture of the hydroponics bay and the mellow warmth of my personal quarters. I even cherish the coldness of the weapons compartment, where the last of our munitions wait patiently to begin their steel-grey procession.
Two hours left.
I bind my journal. A small ring of loose pages forms around me before I collapse them into a thin, wire-bound sheaf. I thumb through a year’s worth of entries – pages marked by the tight lettering of post-combat stress and the shaky penwork of gee-overload injury. Prose made terse by rage, and circuitous by human doubt. After a second of hesitation, I decided to take it with me.
One hour left.
I sit in the observation blister, watching sunlight illuminate the emerald oceans of an alien world. For a moment, it seems close – too close. But then I look for a moment, and I see that the blues and the whites are not quite the same, and I once again find myself in a place between nostalgia and grief.
MERRYGATE appears after a few minutes, as she always does. She hesitates for a moment, but then sits beside me to continue our old ritual. I point towards a bright flock of passing Phoenicids; she marks the outstretched wings of Cygnus, its swan-neck craned skyward by the effects of parallax. And when MIZAR-III moves to cover the swan’s nebula-blue crown, we talk about all we have seen and known through my eyes.
“I am not humanI was never born to a home planet, companion,” she says, encasing my hands with felt-static. “But now I share yours…”
My eyes become wet. Her projection illuminates a constellation of tears.
I return to the bridge ten minutes before the RAIN enters transmission range. MERRYGATE’s avatar flickers gently, as if caught in a light breeze. She checks and re-checks her intrusion software, running last-minute diagnostics on a splice package assembled painstakingly from new data and old lessons. The hypometric weapon shrieks towards operating speed. There is no preparation left to do.
The splice package uploads. A system trace propagates on the bridge display as autonomous intrusion software struggles to gain a foothold against a wary enemy…"
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, DECEMBER 13th, PERSONAL JOURNAL
>ROLL 1d20 best of three. (DC: 5, 10, 15)
