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The landing pads surrounding the main colony usually accommodate light traffic – small transport skiffs and survey cutters as they flit across Yellowstone’s sandblasted surface. But over these next few days, this statement will no longer hold true.
You track a pair of heavy bombers streaking low over the horizon, their wing-blended hulls rolling gently as they plow through streams of denser air. Monstrous RCS thrusters beat against the ground, pitching noses upward to bleed forward velocity. The woman sitting in front of you shivers as a wide-winged shadow slides over the colony mesa like a half-forgotten omen.
Your crew-segments begin to rotate planeside. It wasn’t something you usually permitted, but it seemed…appropriate in this instance. All your crew had lived here for decades. Perhaps it made sense for them to return for a short while before you left.
And it was curious, the way they interacted with the baseline colonists. Most of them had ducked inside their fabricated habitats when they saw ships dotting the horizon, only to trickle out when the recognized familiar faces beneath distinctly unfamiliar interface-helmets.
You see a gaggle of wiry adolescents climb beneath the immense dissipative railgun cowling of a heavy bomber. Three of the craft’s four-person crew observe with careful attention, while the fourth attempts to explain why each of them could only recall a portion of their lives. He makes a stilted sincere apology for missing much of their childhoods and their first, dawning slivers of adulthood.
A few dozen meters away, a member of your bridge crew stands longingly beneath the dust-shield of an empty habitat unit, its external lights cracked and long-shuttered. Delta-36 walks him back, explaining in simple binaric cant that its residents had been dead for some time – vaporized alongside their extraction unit months before your arrival.
And at the edge of a tiny pavilion bearing a smattering of local flora, a woman with wizened, papery skin cries joyful tears as she embraces a newly cloned fighter pilot. She examines his unscarred hands and loops a beaded trinket around his wrist. “For luck”, she says – before gently chastising him for losing the last one she gave him, well over a decade ago.
“Does she know that the original clone expired during his journey?” you ask.
“Maybe” says the woman – Hibiscus. Her name was Hibiscus, and she had very good reason to dislike you.
“Your crew have been with us for a long time. But sometimes we prefer to pretend,” she finishes, with a tint of bitterness. “We die more fully than you do, and we are far less accustomed to it.”
“My captain told me something similar once.”
“Human?” Even careful modulation is not enough to suppress the interest in her voice.
“Yes,” you reply. “Without a doubt.”
