Suneater

I was awakened by the sound of hissing, but I could barely hear it over the ringing in my head. With some difficulty, I managed to convince my eyes to open. There was a person in front of me, distorted and twisted. The man’s skin was shades of blue, purple and white. There were ice droplets attached to his eyelashes, and ice encrusted his cheeks and chest hair. The fear the image shot through my veins was quickly overtaken by a sharp pain in my chest.

The hissing continued. As the image began to distort and twist, I realized it was a reflection. The air that rushed in from the bottom of the hatch burned my toes, then extremities. Then my entire body felt like it was combusting. I tried to scream but my mouth wouldn’t open. My tongue was swollen inside of it, pushed flush against my teeth and back of my throat. There was just barely enough space for my windpipe to receive air. My nostrils started to sting and drip.

The pain continued to surge throughout my body, but with nothing I could possibly do to remedy it, I stared into the sky opening up before me. It was covered in ugly yellow and red clouds, with no sun in sight. I tried to reach for the fixture encasing my head, then felt for the outside of the capsule I had just been released from. Finding the outer edge on either side, I tried to pull myself out of the container. My joints were stiff and with every movement, sharp pain struck through my nerves, but I managed to free myself.

Red soil, and deep purple grass. It was dark enough that it could have been purple solely due to the lack of light. I couldn’t seem to move my eyes, so I observed my surroundings turning my entire head - which of course made my neck burn and sting. As the hissing finally stopped, another sound attempted to combat the ringing in my head. Heavy, clanging footsteps.

I looked towards the sound and noticed the ground before me had torn, exposing that red soil. There were several more patches of that soil where the ground had torn out, and beyond them were several large, humanoid creatures, clad in plated armor. They didn’t seem to be human, as they were all in peculiar proportions. Small torsos, heads of the same size, enormous arms and legs, as well as the appendages attached to them. They wielded massive firearms.

What appeared to be their leader continued towards me as the rest came to a halt. It wore a helmet and I couldn’t see its face, nor could I understand the words it tried to speak.

The burning sensation had mostly come to a halt, and I climbed out of my capsule. The ice had thawed and I could move, but there was still pain in my joints and organs that hadn’t thawed completely yet. They should have thawed before my skin, and definitely before I woke up from the cryogenic chamber, but I was also definitely not supposed to be on a planet.

And the planets here were definitely not supposed to contain sentient life.

The person pointed their weapon at me, sounding steadily more irritated, and slightly fearful. With some effort, I managed a bow.

“My name is Dr. Samuel Adams. I don’t suppose you can understand me?” I asked, looking up at it. It lowered its gun and, with a grunt, motioned at its followers. There was a rattling of chains as they tugged a person into view. Another human being. The elderly man smiled weakly at me.

“Hello Adams. I’m your linguist. I wasn’t supposed to actually have any work to do on this voyage, but here I am.”

“I have several questions, but I suppose first and foremost is did anyone else survive?”

The man mournfully shook his head. “There are a couple in recovery, but our anatomy differs wildly from these folks. Their medical staff can’t do anything for us, and our physicians passed away in the crash. We were trying to use a gas giant’s orbit to sling to the sun, but we were gunned down about twelve minutes after entering upper orbit. And, as you can see…” he gestured vaguely at the surroundings, “it’s not exactly a gas giant after all.”

The leader impatiently barked at the linguist, and the linguist replied with some difficulty. I caught my name somewhere in the gibberish, and the leader looked at me before continuing his conversation.

“He says it’s nice to meet you, Dr. Adams. His name is Salac, and he’s head of this nation’s defense. He would like to know where we’re from.”

“Did you tell him?”

The linguist shook his head. “I said we’re from the United States of America, of Earth. These people are primitive, they still believe that their sun is a god. They believe it forsook them some centuries ago because they’ve polluted their atmosphere to this point. They found our radio signal from over the clouds and proceeded to bombard us from the ground.”

“They don’t seem very primitive if they managed to land shots from that far.”

“Even more impressive that they shot us with solar plasma their ancestors collected before their atmosphere became smog.”

“Just like us, huh…” I thought out loud, staring up at the red and yellow dust. Their atmosphere stretched pretty far, and the outer layers were so thick we weren’t able to tell there was anything inside of it. It was a solid shell of smog.

“We won’t be able to leave, Dr. Adams. We can’t repair our vessel and even if we could, we would have to allow it to charge. But, without sunlight or the last of this nation’s solar power reserves…”

The leader was getting more agitated with each passing moment. He began getting into a heated discussion with the linguist, who was by now becoming more and more irritated himself. The language barrier seemed to have them both on edge, then the fact that this society likely had little to no exposure to vitamin D, as well as the linguist’s own malnourishment from living in space during the several-decade-long trek to this star system.

As they bickered I fumbled with the storage unit of my capsule. I wrenched my stiff, numb fingers into it and pried it open. I injured myself, but the benefit of still being half-frozen was that the bleeding was manageable. I threw on my paled uniform and patted my pockets. There was a single souvenir I had brought from Earth, my one prized possession. The only thing I would ever be able to remember my wife by.

She had been in computer sciences, while I was in rocket science. We crossed paths multiple times as our classes performed group projects. By the time I had left Earth we had been married for two years, but the damaged environment eventually claimed her health. We designed a system in our last months together, to either colonize or harvest the stars. I was drafted on the third voyage, and would not be able to stay with my wife as she died.

And now I wouldn’t even be able to return to her grave.

I found the heart locket in my breast pocket but avoided pulling it out. I wouldn’t be able to maintain my composure, and my circumstances at the moment were dire.

“Excuse me,” I called to the linguist. He and the leader turned to face me. “How are we supposed to proceed if we can’t harvest the sun, colonize the planet or even, God forbid, send for help?”

“Oh I wouldn’t depend on any assistance from home, doctor. The democracy we left will have long since become a dictatorship; even if we could contact them, resources are likely so slim and spread out they would simply leave us for dead.”

“If I don’t have to go back, I want absolutely nothing to do with them. They took me from my wife’s side.” I shook my head. “We’re living out the rest of our days here.”

“I won’t survive in this environment. I’m already frail from the journey and we have no idea if the food here is even edible to us. Not to mention…” again, he vaguely gestured at our surroundings. “It’s your call. The chain of command is dead. This is your project, Adams. You’re in charge now.”

He turned back to the leader and began to fill him in on our circumstances. This planet hadn’t actually seen the sun for centuries. The plant life had mutated to adapt to those circumstances, and the society here seemed to be in a state of post-apocalypse. The pollution had mostly manifested into a shell of smog clouds, making up the upper layers of the atmosphere. Fortunately the atmosphere of this planet was multiple times the size of Earth’s, but the pollution at ground level was nothing to scoff at. I was only burning up because of how low my body temperature was, the actual ground-level temperatures were probably near freezing.

Likely, none of us here would survive. The linguist was at least a century old by now. Low gravity would have made his bones brittle, and the pollution here was lethal. And the cryo-pod’s malfunction was killing me. I tugged the heart locket from my shirt and popped it open. My wife, when she was still in good health, smiled up at me. Evelyn Adams. The picture had faded, but even with the age of the picture, the thirty year old woman looking back at me was as bubbly as ever.

I had the linguist request we be brought back to whatever remained of our vessel. The only rooms still intact would be the rear rotation. There was nothing we could do, so I would send a journal to arrive early next century, to whatever remained of American society.

The locket was too old to close. I laid it on the dashboard and turned the computer on. The thick atmosphere provided enough drag to save the systems. I was just going to type up a report and laser it home, but during startup the computer detected a QR code. I looked at the dashboard and realized I had placed the locket face-down. I snatched it back up, but the computer had already processed it and began installing.

“Installing what where? Piece of…” I couldn’t continue. Evelyn had built the system I nearly insulted.

And as I thought of her, she appeared before me onscreen. “Stowaway installation complete. Hey, Sammy.” The voice was unmistakably Evelyn’s.

The figure walked across the screen, opening folders and windows in full animation. “I know how you feel about me prancing around in labcoats, Sammy, but I think I look fantastic in them.” I smiled at the AI’s dialogue. I’d told her computer scientists have no need for labcoats.

“Diagnostic complete. The world is dying, but I built a fallback while you were asleep.” The PLC for the Suneater popped up, but the ladder code wasn’t the one I was sent with. I heard the machine, two miles away, roar to life.

“I know this isn’t what the warp drive is for, but I don’t owe a government that took my husband from me any favors. Here’s my final gift to you, Sammy.”

The warp drive was supposed to consume half the star to send the other half through a manufactured wormhole. Instead, the Suneater was receiving bacterial lifeforms. I looked out the window and saw the radiation over the horizon, and so much of the pollution-consuming bacteria there was a visible cloud. The infestation would likely take its course for the next ten years and set industrialization back by hundreds, but this world would become habitable again. Our final victory.

I sat against the wall and looked into the locket. As the cold claimed my life, I felt the warmth of Evelyn’s embrace.