The Facem was frighteningly large. Somehow, George had failed to realize this on his first exposure to the starship. On his second look, it indeed stopped looking like a spacecraft at all. A better analog would be a great city, floating silently in the ink.

When he had first seen it, the Facem had been as new as any ship in the solar system, flawless down to the varnish. Its time in interstellar space had been hard on the starship, however. The colorful, painted hull was now streaked with charred lines and pits where impactors had vaporized against the ablative material. The heat shield at the bow, now folded back to allow the secondary engines to burn, was stained white. Perhaps most concerningly, several large cracks spanned the metal hulk of one of the engine units. Probably the intense heat of the annihilation reaction.

But still, the Facem was mostly intact. It could make another run if it wanted to.

George docked the shuttle without incident and retreated into the depths of the starship. Unsurprisingly, the interior was much less worn down than the hull. The walls and ceilings, indeed everything, were all still perfectly white, gleaming in the clean LED light as if they had been built yesterday. The bridge, too was in almost perfect condition, the same as it was that day almost six years ago.

George glanced at his assigned station, with its tiny screen and uncomfortable crash couch, and decided to use the admiral's chair instead. He sank into the veritable ocean of foam and waited for radio contact from the ground. George noticed with surprise and joy that the chair held a high-level pass card, probably the admiral's. Something to do later.

In the meantime, he decided to look through the ship's computer system. As an ensign, he had very little access, but it was enough for the time being.

George pulled up a schematic of the starship and studied it. The details eluded him, but the abundance of green color coding seemed to confirm that the Facem was in good shape. Looking more closely at the habitation module, he saw the cluster of towers that was the residential areas. They were largely uninteresting, a ring of tall structures filled with a honeycomb of small apartments. Just as George shifted his attention to another part of the ship, he noticed that one set of towers was not quite like the rest. There were four of them, all hollow and fitted with tanks of hypergolic rocket fuel. Well-hidden thrusters poked out of each corner of the towers, almost as if they were meant to act as separate spacecraft.

Before George could find anything else, a notification appeared on the screen obscuring the diagram. A very stern looking man scowled out at him and barked a greeting.

"Ensign Archer. This is Lieutenant Hernandez from Eridu Base. I have a list of tasks for you, which you should receive in the next few minutes. Report back to me once all are complete."

The face disappeared and a file appeared in its place. It was stamped and titled to look official, but it contained nothing but a short, bulleted list of commands. George saw mostly busywork, such as satellite data processing and the like, but there were some interesting points. Apparently, he was the only man authorized to handle direct comms from Earth, which was surprising.

Radio communications were not useful beyond a few million kilometers. At twenty light years, there would be nothing but static from even the best transmitters. Instead, a system of tiny probes was used to transfer information between the colony and Earth. Nothing but an RTG, an ion engine, and a radio antenna, they were very light and robust. Once launched, they would accelerate for years, and pass the solar system traveling at a fraction the speed of light. The probes would sail for the better part of three decades before finally coming into range. Slightly slower than radio, but much more effective across the enormous distances between the stars.

A probe from Earth was due to arrive in a few days. It would be a purely celebratory gesture, having been sent mere weeks after the launch of the Facem itself, and would contain no useful information. Indeed, any meaningful exchange would have to wait more than sixty years. Almost entirely useless.

But it was more than nothing. At the very least, the colony's eventual destruction would not go unheard.

George took pause at that thought. It seemed natural. Of course the colony would fail. There were too many ways it could all come crashing down. And he was the one who would watch it happening, safe from the lofty height of orbit.

Alone.

Except for the stars, he reminded himself. They would always be there. A little unfamiliar perhaps, but mostly the same.

The first task on his list was a simple status check of the satellites, which could be done at a glance of the screen. All was well on that front, and George marked the item completed. The next task was an orbital adjustment of the Facem.

Despite being the size of a large asteroid, the starship was quite agile. Its maneuvering thrusters were simple chemical rockets, safe and powerful. These could be used to get the Facem to a lower orbit, more accessible by the colony in case things went wrong.

It was a simple matter. George input the desired orbital parameters and confirmed them before settling into his lavish admiral's chair and feeling the slight tug of acceleration as the moving mountain spun and thrusted. George close his eyes. The burn lasted a few minutes.

The new orbit put the starship at a much lower altitude, just barely skimming the atmosphere. Without continuous station keeping, it would eventually crash into the planet. What a sight that would be, thought George. The Facem still held a few hundred kilograms of antimatter in its stores, and the spontaneous annihilation would produce quite the lightshow.

The next task was satellite map processing, which struck George as terrifyingly dull. Instead, he decided to amuse himself by making a mental list of all the possible ways the colony could end.

He realized that the first was staring at him now: the starship could come tumbling down and irradiate the whole planet.

The rains might stop coming for months on end, leaving the farms dry and fruitless.

The sun might flare up, scalding the surface and frying the colony.

The planet might harbor an unseen pathogen, a plague waiting to happen.

The colonists themselves might grow tired and decide to end it, one by one.

The planet's soil might prove poisonous, dooming the colony to starvation.

The planetary hurricane might graze the colony, beating it into rubble with wind.

The human body might not be able to conceive or birth in the world's alien conditions.

Perhaps the worst of all was the possibility of a flood, sudden and inevitable, that would come roaring down from the mountains and swallow the colony whole. George shuddered to think of that.

But, as long as he stayed up here, George would be safe. The Facem could sustain him easily for the rest of his life, and could, if he so wished, return to Earth. He was the safe.

Content with his list so far, George returned to his task, and found it mostly done already. The satellite map composites were already compiled and ready for viewing, and he took a moment to admire them. Mountains and volcanoes scattered across the endless orange plains, immense canyons, briny lakes rimmed with white salt deposits. And all this in just the thin slice of land between the frozen wastes and the boiling desert.

Gaea was its name. George had hardly ever used it, preferring instead to call it simply 'the planet', but he found it suddenly beautiful. Ironically so, but beautiful nonetheless. Gaea was the Earth Mother, the progenitor of the world and an embodiment of the life-giving nature of the soil. This planet was a near opposite, dry and inhospitable, which brought into stark highlight just how lush and vibrant Earth was by comparison. And yet, this was the best humanity could find. Laughable, truly.

George was thoroughly of the opinion that the mission in its entirety was a mistake. He realized his opinion was likely not widely held, but that was of little importance. There was nothing good to be had out here. The land, the sky, the stars themselves were alien and unfamiliar. He felt both a castaway and an intruder, separated from the world he had known so long and thrust into a new, unwelcoming one.

George sighed and finished processing the images before moving on to the next task. A thorough systems check, to make sure the starship was still space worthy. Another simple thing, something the computer could do on its own. Instead of wasting his time, George got up, taking the pass card with him, and left the bridge entirely.

For some time, he wandered the pristine halls, getting lost in the endless curves and perfect white, letting his mind numb itself almost to oblivion. He eventually ran into a dead end, and made to turn around and head back.

A hole appeared in the wall and gaped at him. Without considering the matter very much, George continued into it.

The hole led to a short corridor that ended with an intimidatingly large blast door. When he approached it, the words "Welcome, Admiral Caroline Pierce" flashed briefly in his retina before the door swung open.

Inside was a phalanx of glass tubes and walls of dark monitors. There was a sudden and impossible breeze at his back, air rushing in through the open blast door. George was now very confused, something he would rather not be. He stepped forward to take a closer look.

George flinched at the sound of the blast door slamming shut, followed by a deep, fiery thrum reverberating from behind it. One thing at a time, he told himself.

The room was small, crowded by the tubes so that there was very little room to move. For the most part, the walls were bare metal, grey. This detail was itself a curiosity on a ship that was fitted almost entirely in white. The far wall had a compact airlock that led directly to the outside vacuum. George could see the stars through it.

Turning back to the tubes, he noticed that all but one held small, sharp stones. Unusual. He was about to take a closer look when he was thrown into the ceiling.

An agonized roar filled the room, coming from everywhere. George stood still for a moment, dazed and afraid, waiting for the noise to subside. By the time he regained his senses, the sound had gone from a deep, explosive thud to a high-pitched whistle.

George hurried to the blast door and opened it. The air immediately began to rush out of the room behind him, and into the corridors of the Facem. He didn't stop to think about this, and instead rushed headlong through the white corridors, desperate to find the way back to the bridge. The breeze seemed to strengthen over time, buffeting him in random and disorienting directions.

By the time George saw the bridge, his ears were burning with pain and his breath came in short, thirsty bursts. There was a hull breach, it was obvious, and the Facem was rapidly depressurizing, leaking like a burst balloon. In a normal shape, a freighter, he could have tried finding the breach and sealing it before all the air was sucked out, but on a vessel this large, all he could hope to do was seal himself off in a small corner and hope that wasn't compromised.

The bridge was untouched, and George breathed deeply once the door was sealed behind him. The monitors painted a grim picture. The habitation module had been punctured, a thirty-meter long gash through its metal skin. The inner hull had been breached as well, and the hole was much too big to plug. The resulting air leak had already reduced air pressure to dangerous levels all around the ship. There were still uncompromised bubbles scattered through the structure, but they were few and tiny. The Facem, had been killed.

George sent a distress message to the surface summarizing the damage and requesting further instruction, then tried to find what caused the breach. It didn't take long; the navigational radar quickly picked up an asteroid, spinning away at a frighteningly high speed, trailed by a cloud of metal shards. A natural collision. Something so unlikely that it was not even considered a threat.

George looked at the spinning image of the rock for a few minutes, until the response came from the colony. The bearded man appeared again, his face as stony as it always was.

"Ensign Archer, you are to remain in the bridge and continue monitoring the situation."

That was all. George silently asked the empty screen what exactly that meant, then returned to the overview diagram of the Facem. The situation was largely unchanged, and it seemed that the isolated corners of the ship that still held air were sustaining themselves, but the rest of it was a hard vacuum.

Well, this would complicate matters. The starship was no longer capable of sustaining him for longer than perhaps a day or two in its current state, when the emergency air recyclers began sputtering and his meager food reserves ended. He expected someone would come to get him sooner than that, but his dreams of staying in orbit and watching the colony perish from heaven were shattered.

George sighed. His mind eventually wandered back to the room he had found, with its glass tubes and rocks. It was a strange thing to find on a colony ship, even stranger that it would be crammed so close to the edge of the outer hull. He looked for the room in the diagram, and unsurprisingly could not find it.

"Ensign Archer," shouted the screen. George started and found the stern bearded face back again. "We have sent a dropship to pick you up, piloted by Petty Officer David Shen. He expects you to be at aft end port complex in less than two hours. Godspeed, Ensign."

The spark of goodwill was lost on George. He was doomed, dragged down to die with the rest of them. Unfortunate.

There was a line of pressure suits standing in the corner, harsh green to be picked out more easily against a background of stars. He donned one, then looked back at the image of the dying Facem. At least he wasn't alone.