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Five months ago.

Twelve light-years from Earth, Lieutenant Commander Valory Jeanne was alone in the astrophysics lab when the United Earth Space Force (UESF) ship, Copernicus, started to lose atmosphere. She shut the airtight compartment hatch and put on her emergency breathing apparatus as required per the emergency procedures manual just as an explosion rocked the ship. She lost her balance and struck her head on a computer console and was rendered unconscious. The unexpected meteor storm struck while the ship orbited a newly discovered planet in the Tau Ceti star system and was destroyed. Valory never heard the abandon ship alarms.

When Valory awoke, the lab was dark, quiet, and getting colder. Her head hurt, and her ribs and left arm were sore from lying in an unnatural position. The only illumination emanated from an emergency lantern on the bulkhead that cast ominous shadows throughout the compartment. She pulled herself to a sitting position using the computer console as a backrest. Gingerly she rubbed her ribs and arm and checked for broken bones. Although painful, she found only bruises. She attempted to stand and grasped the console for support when the room began to spin. The lean, forty-two-year-old PhD astrophysicist paused for a moment while the dizziness abated. She attempted to use the ship’s intercom to call for help and realized that all the circuits were dead. In frustration and fear, she shouted, “Help! Can anyone hear me?” After regaining her balance, she approached the hatch and saw that the pressure meter above the entrance to the adjacent compartment read zero. She said to herself, “Great! Now, what do I do?”

The adjacent compartment was without air, so she couldn’t open the hatch without losing atmosphere from her compartment. Valory considered her options that were few. She first attempted to find a way out of the astrophysics lab to the rest of the ship. The Extra Vehicular Activity training back at the Earth space station before the Copernicus departed was instrumental. She had used that training when she replaced the gravimetric sensor array with the upgraded version developed by Dr. Sullivan, the head of the astrophysics lab on the Copernicus.

She donned a spacesuit from one of the storage lockers in the lab. The EVA experience prepared her to use the lab’s airlock to go outside the ship where she eventually found a hull breach from one of the explosions large enough for her to reenter. The large breach minimized the chance of snagging and ripping her spacesuit and allowed her entrance to the airless portion of the ship. Valory made her way to the Emergency Departure Compartment to discover that five of the capsules had successfully launched, but that the others were damaged beyond her ability to repair. Her next thought was to use the shuttle to escape. Not being a pilot, she anticipated that she could use the onboard computers and autopilot to land in a safe area, hopefully near the other escape pods on the planet below, Tau Ceti g.

On her way to the shuttle bay, Valory discovered that one of the power cores on the ship was still producing power, but only to the battery backup system. All the regular power connections had been severed by meteors that punctured the spacecraft or were burned through by surges in the system before the circuit breakers were able to engage. In some cases, the power surge was so intense that arcing across the circuit breakers fused them before they could trip and caused massive damage and fires in equipment. With no atmosphere or power in the bulk of the ship, the flames extinguished, and the environmental controls were offline. Artificial gravity was spotty, dependent upon where the graviton power junctions and plates weren’t destroyed.

However, when she arrived at the shuttle bay, she discovered prior damage from a thruster failure while entering the bay the week before, and it had only been partially repaired. In addition to the non-completed repairs, she found several baseball-sized, ragged hull punctures that would present a problem from heat build-up during reentry. There were also many heat ablative tiles cracked or missing on the wings and fuselage. She suspected the damage was due to meteor fragments ricocheting inside the hanger. Unfortunately, the destruction required more than she could fix to make the shuttle flight worthy.

Needing a place to eat, sleep, stay warm, and that had sanitary facilities was an immediate problem. The spacesuit could provide most of what Valory required, but only temporarily. She could charge the spacesuit batteries and exchange oxygen tanks while wearing the suit, but that was a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Refilling the suit’s liquid food and water containers, and emptying the sanitary holding bags required her to open her suit, which could only be done in the astrophysics lab where there was an atmosphere though the process had to be completed quickly because of the extreme cold. The food and water containers would take several hours to thaw once inside the suit, so planning ahead was essential. She knew her situation was dismal, and the longer she put off figuring out how to stay alive the direr her circumstance would become. She realized that even if there were heat in the astrophysics lab, with the environmental controls off-line, rising carbon dioxide levels would eventually make the air toxic and unbreathable. Thus, the shuttle became her focus for living quarters.

It took several days for Valory to make enough repairs to the shuttle to maintain atmospheric pressure inside and turn on the heat. The shuttle was designed to be used by a crew of four and accommodate up to sixteen passengers, sustaining them for voyages up to thirty days’ duration, so it was relatively comfortable in a Spartan sort of way. With the onboard anti-matter drives, power would last for many years. Wastewater could be recycled providing her with virtually an unlimited supply of water. There was enough food to sustain her for twelve months, which could be supplemented with food packets from the ship. She was grateful when she could finally remove her spacesuit to shower and get a hot meal with solid food.

After restoring pressure to the shuttle, Valory had found that all its systems were working properly except the flight controls that were damaged beyond her ability to repair. Power, artificial gravity, heat, sanitation facilities, computers, and air and water regeneration modules all worked within acceptable parameters. However, during her investigation of the onboard systems, she discovered that the inertial dampeners only functioned when the shuttle was in flight. She also noted that the onboard computers had not been updated with the latest information about the planet since all systems were off during the repair. The communication console seemed to work well according to the display. However, when she tried to contact the escape capsules that had departed for the surface, she wasn’t sure if the signal was getting through the hull of the Copernicus, or if no one had made it alive to the surface to respond to her hails. As far as she knew, she was the lone survivor.

Confusion and pain caused Lezah to blink hard as he strained to see through blurred vision. He gingerly shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs; it throbbed as if it had a heartbeat of its own. His body ached. He licked his lips and tasted the coppery tang of blood, the scent of it stronger through what air passed through the clots in his nostrils. He coughed. Pain shot through his chest, and wide-eyed, he gasped for air through the bloody phlegm. His labored breathing sounded raspy and unnaturally loud. He heard a slight click as he inhaled and exhaled. He closed his eyes and slowly reached to rub them, his movements hindered by pain and something blocking his reach. He opened his eyes. Unfocused spots of light obliquely crossed his field of vision in slow motion. Unable to reach his eyes, he shook his head despite the pain and blinked hard several more times. His vision gradually cleared with each blink. The ambiguous lights slowly resolved into winking pinpoints seen through a spray of blood inside his visor from the cough. Lezah Yetz, one of the few EVA-qualified astrophysics technicians, vaguely remembered reaching to replace one of many malfunctioning sensors that surrounded the bow of a spaceship that repair autobots were unable to handle due to the fragility of each sensor. He realized that he, in a spacesuit, was in a slow, uncoordinated tumble while still clutching the extraction tool that was tied to his thickly gloved hand.

Lezah carefully reached to his right side and slid his hand down to the joystick attached to his work belt. Pushing while twisting the handle and depressing a button that triggered measured bursts of propellant from jets on the belt and his backpack, he stabilized the spin, moaning in pain with every sustained burst. Suddenly, something struck him on his left shoulder from behind, which set him to cough and spin again. He clenched his teeth and worked through the pain to quickly stop the gyration and searched through his blood-covered visor to see what it was that hit him. His face registered shock as he gawked at the stiff and frozen body of the cook who had prepared his breakfast that morning as it slowly tumbled away. The technician shuddered and chilled as an overwhelming sense of dread nearly incapacitated him. An involuntary moan of fear escaped his swollen and bleeding lips. He twisted the maneuvering handle and pushed the button to rotate in place. Open-mouthed, he gaped at a gradually widening debris field spreading from the wreckage of what was once the spaceship that had been his duty station for the last two annual cycles. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest, and his breath caught at the sudden realization that when his air ran out, he would die.

He made several calls for help on comms, nothing, not even static. The radio was dead silent.

Not one to give up hope easily, Lezah used controlled bursts from his jet pack to maneuver to the larger sections of debris in hopes of finding intact compartments with people still alive, or possibly an escape pod that was not damaged, to extend his life and give him the ability to call for help. Instead, he found two intact EVA packs with full oxygen and maneuvering thruster charges that he could exchange when the one he was wearing ran out, which allowed him more time to search. His ship was large, even by Andrenes standards, and that gave him confidence that surely there must be others alive. However, the destruction was complete. He was the sole survivor.

Not knowing what cataclysmic event could have caused the ship’s demise, and in hopes of someone discovering the wreckage and his body, Lezah had carefully scanned the debris field with the camera in his helmet. He gave a running narrative of his findings during his search and documented the tragedy’s approximate time and date. He glanced above the visor inside his helmet to check the level of his depleting oxygen reserves. Not much left.

While in great pain due to fits of coughing with broken ribs and fighting exhaustion, he began a farewell message to his family.

“Nayeth.” His voice cracked in the helmet. “Nayeth, my love, I do not know if this recording will ever reach you. I hope that it does.” He swallowed against the blood in his throat. “I am the only one left. The ship is gone. Everyone is gone. I don’t know what happened. One moment I was on the hull replacing a sensor, and then … this.”

He paused. A cough seized him, and for several seconds, he could not speak. When it passed, he blinked hard and tilted his head, trying to find a clear spot on the visor to see through the spray of blood.

“Tell the children that their father thought of them. Tell Saeven that I am sorry I will miss his acceptance ceremony. He worked so hard for it. I know he will make us proud.” Another pause. His breathing was shallow now, each inhale accompanied by the faint click of the regulator that had become the metronome of his remaining life. “Tell little Myra that the stars are beautiful from out here. She always asked me what they looked like up close. They look … they look the same as from home, actually. Just brighter. And there are so many of them.”

His voice softened. “Nayeth, do you remember the night I asked you to bond with me? We were on the observation platform above the northern sea, and the aurora was so bright that it cast our shadows on the deck. You said you would think about it.” He managed a small, painful laugh that turned into a wince. “You made me wait three days. I thought I would go mad. When you finally said yes, I couldn’t speak. You had to say it twice because I just stood there with my mouth open.”

He closed his eyes and let the memory hold him for a moment—her face in the aurora light, the warmth of her hand when she reached for his.

“I am proud of the life we built together. I am proud of our children. I am proud that I was accepted into the space program and that it gave our family a good life.” He opened his eyes. The oxygen indicator had dropped to the last mark. “I want you to know that I am not afraid. I am sad. I am sad that I will not hold you again, or see Saeven stand before the council, or hear Myra laugh when she runs through the garden. But I am not afraid.”

He inhaled. The click sounded. He exhaled. The click sounded again.

He inhaled.

Silence.

The click did not come. The regulator had nothing left to give.

Lezah’s eyes widened for a moment—an instinctive flash of panic that he forced down with the discipline of a man who had spent his career in the vacuum. He would not let his last moments be fear. He closed his eyes deliberately.

“I love you all,” he whispered. The words fogged the visor one final time.

He made peace with his deity in the silence of his own mind. The cold was coming now—not the cold of space, which the suit still held at bay, but a deeper cold, the kind that starts in the fingertips and works inward. He did not fight it. He let the memories come instead. Nayeth’s face. Saeven’s serious eyes bent over his studies. Myra’s laughter, bright and careless, ringing through the rooms of their home.

The memories dimmed.

The stars continued to shine through the bloody visor, indifferent and eternal, as Lezah Yetz drifted among the wreckage and was still.

* * * * *

From the shadowed bridge of a cloaked warship, an alien commander observed the scene. The Andrenes technician was insignificant, a mere speck among the wreckage. Yet the survivor’s determination intrigued them.

“The test is complete,” the commander intoned in their native language. His voice carried a calm, mechanical precision. “Other than the loss of the weapon because the ship was destroyed before it could depart the area, it functioned as designed. Prepare the fleet for the next phase.”

A subordinate hesitated. “Commander, the survivor …”

“Irrelevant,” the commander said, his tone dismissive.

The subordinate did not relent. “He has been recording. If his people recover the footage—”

“Then they will see the wreckage of a ship destroyed by forces they do not understand. It will tell them nothing useful and everything they need to fear.” He turned to face the viewport, where the stars seemed to shift and dance against the cloaking field. “Let them flail. Their attempts to understand will only delay their inevitable demise.”

The bridge fell silent as the warship shifted, its cloaking field distorting the light around it. Then, it was gone.