White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Six

I don't know anymore if we're going to make it off of Mahaha.

The longer I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling, the more settled that thought becomes. I can't dismiss the possibility that Krüger was only the first to fall to the moon's icy clutches. If that doesn't satisfy it, the rest of us will follow sooner or later, taken directly when we have to go outside to move the Pod, or killed in here as ice works its way into ever more critical systems. We'll be frozen to death, maybe, but more likely suffocated. We don't have the materials to patch infinite oxygen leaks, and we're down to two masks.

Midmorning ticks by. Kwon comes to find me with a bowl of soup and a mug of tea, her face creased in sympathy. I must look a mess. I'm sitting on my bed now, my back to the wall and the little slips of paper from the box in my keepsake drawer sitting in two piles in front of me. Each time I read through them all, I flip the whole pile back over and start again.

I don't know what I'm looking for. Some clue, maybe, but to what, I don't know. Maybe to Mahaha's motives. If it's only as smart as a toddler or a dog, there must be some pattern to what it does: some simple drive besides fear that makes it act this way towards us. Those of us who aren't Kwon, that is. I pick up another news clipping, but the headline and bite-sized blurb only give the basics of the Neuron Theory of Planetary Consciousness. It's a stunningly useless piece of information now that we're face to face with what it actually entails.

But the clippings on the Theory aren't the ones I linger on. I reach the bottom of the pile again and stare at the last slip of paper. It's the one with Yahvi and I's picture on it, and a string of accolades for the way we taught our trainees. In the picture, Yahvi's arm is around my shoulders—a farce for the public eye. If that was taken in private, she'd be using my head as an armrest. But we're both smiling.

I want a glimpse of that adventuring spirit that abandoned me nine years ago. It's not in the rest of this pile. Just a couple of clippings at the bottom, before I broke up our team.

What happened to me? Back then, I would have loved to explore this moon. To interact with its butterflies—its messengers, it seems—find out what they liked or wanted, and try to befriend them. I would have had safety precautions in place, sure, but they would have been for events out in the field, not to keep us out of the field in the first place.

Back then, everyone would obey Yahvi and I when things spun off-plan. They took that spin often. And yet somehow, even in the midst of that near-constant chaos, I always felt like I was in control. I can remember two times in the last nine years when I got that feeling back again. The first was the moment just weeks ago when I agreed to let Liu and Krüger out in the field if they let me train them in return. Even that fell apart. But the second...

I set the paper slips back in their box and open my keepsake drawer again. This time, I pull out the magazine I stashed there when our last resource pod came. On its cover is a picture of what looks at first glance like a surfaced submarine with its whole crew on top, their hands raised in celebration. No submarine is so large, though. It's an F-300 interstellar liner, intact and adrift in the waters of the ocean moon Tikokura. And I put it there.

When you go through pilot's training in the UIS, they prepare you for every possible eventuality. Each trainee logs thousands of hours in high-tech VR simulators designed to mimic the sight, sound, and even feel of emergencies, from terrorist action to mechanical failure. Nothing, though, prepares you for the ludicrous situation of losing your full bank of thrusters to an asteroid swarm at half of light speed, while aimed directly at a star you're supposed to circle for a gravity assist.

I had only the counter-thrusters—the liner's brakes—and minimal steering left: not enough to get around the star, but just enough to make for a different target. There was just enough distance between us and Tikokura to slow just enough to survive the impact. I told the other pilots to follow my orders, then captained us to the first emergency F-300 water landing in the history of the UIS.