Caroline Pierce stared silently as the dropship ascended through the wispy clouds, trailing its own thin line of vapor. The deep roar of its four engines had long since been defeated by the humming of the wind. With that sound went the last of the remaining rocket fuel. There would be no more missions to the orbiting starship.

Caroline looked away from the shrinking spacecraft and surveyed the rest of the sky, searching for the tiny glimmer of the Facem, orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the surface. She could not find it.

The accident was so wildly unlikely that she still doubted it had truly happened. There must be some mistake. That idiot Archer must have gotten confused. Maybe he did it himself. Either way, there was no escaping the fact that the starship was permanently crippled, which held any number of consequences for the colony. Perhaps the most important was the fact that they no longer had control of the spacecraft, and seeing as it was currently in a dangerously low orbit, there was a good chance that it would deorbit soon enough. When that happened, nothing would save the colony.

Caroline turned away from the dissipating ribbon of exhaust and ducked through the opening of a field tent. The soft light of computer monitors greeted her.

"Good afternoon, Admiral Pierce!" exclaimed Hernandez as he saluted.

"At ease, Lieutenant. Is Archer still breathing?"

"Yeah. Though I'm not sure if that's a good thing," Hernandez said with a grin. "David's reporting that his flight's good and green. Feeling good about this."

"Are you? Well that makes one of us." Caroline found herself a seat. "Is the Facem still operable? Could we get it flying again?"

"Oh sure. Some basic rebalancing to make up for the scratch and it'll work perfectly. The rock didn't hit anything too vital, thank the stars."

The admiral grunted.

Outside, a fleet of armored trucks pulled to a stop. Each one carried a broad radio dish, each glinting like a crescent moon in the setting sun. A flood of technicians began tending to them the moment the trucks halted, connecting wires and adjusting antennae.

A longshot, though Caroline, but it was their only chance to regain control of the starship. The radio array was the only one capable of direct contact with the Facem, the only one able to track it as it streaked across the sky. Nothing else would allow her to take control of the starship's thrusters and guide it back to a safe altitude. The ship's computer would not give up its authority to a relayed command.

The problems were many and worrying. First, the connection could only be held while the Facem was visible in the sky, leaving her in the dark most of the time. There was no guarantee that the maneuvering thrusters would be able to wrest the bulk of the starship up to where it needed to be, what with the unexpected change in the center of mass that came with a complete hull breach.

For a time, Caroline watched the technicians rush like a group of ants to prepare the radio array for its work, then ducked back into the field tent.

"How about as it is? Let's say I want to use the thrusters now, without rebalancing the ship. Would that work?"

Hernandez breathed a sigh. "Might. Might not. I guess we'll see when we try."

The thin whine of tracking motors erupted from behind her. The shouts of the technicians rose to a fevered pitch.

"Looks like we have a connection," said Hernandez.

Caroline stepped out of the tent to watch the Facem soar above her on its low polar orbit, swinging by at a breakneck pace. The array swiveled to follow it, squealing with strain. "Okay," she yelled back to the lieutenant. "Go for a prograde burn now!"

There was nothing but the whirr of the motors and the whisper of the wind. Then, Hernandez shouted back. "I'm not getting a good response. It looks like the ship is pointed in the wrong direction. I could try the attitude control thrusters, but wouldn't recommend it. Unpredictable in this situation."

"What would you recommend?"

"Try again in a couple hours. It'll pass over us pointed right side up and we can have another go."

Their work done, the team of technicians retreated to their trucks and waited for the admiral and the engineer to finish their business. The sun shone softly over the mountains. Caroline felt the wind pick up and retreated to the tent's shelter. There was a melancholy silence between her and the lieutenant, filled only by the hiss of the breeze.

"You know, this colony is a hell of a gamble," said Caroline. "It's balancing on a thin wire, and there's no safety net. We're entirely isolated. All the other space colonies were pretty much extensions of Earth, at least in the beginning. They could always rely on a rescue mission when things went wrong. But not us. We're the most expensive colony ever built, but if something happens to us, we're done. We're alone.

"It was still built with Earth's money. Just about everything we've got came from the surface at one point or another. I mean, just look outside. The food we're eating is grown on imported soil. This might be another planet, but our little patch of ground is just as much a part of Earth as where you grew up."

"Of course it's that way. You throw a man out into space, he's going to die, unless you give him a suit. But we're not just getting thrown out, we're getting shot out the railgun. I have to wonder, why?"

"Well, you know, it's the natural progression of things. First we go to the moon, then Mars, then here."

"That's the thing, though. All those landings happened because of some political pretext. No one just sends people out into the unknown without some expected reward. And seeing how expensive that monster of a ship is, I don't think we'll be turning a profit any time soon. But that doesn't make this mission any different than all the rest."

"Okay, Admiral, what's the profit on this mission?"

"You know how the ancient Egyptians built huge tombs to immortalize their kings? This is like that, except we're trying to immortalize more than just one person."

When James entered the observation room the next morning, he didn't find Nadya waiting for him. He considered this an opportunity to get some work done in silence, and turned off the music.

The screen flickered on under his fingers and flashed the EXN triangle. While he waited for the system to boot up, James watched the eggshell containment vessel as it sat, perfectly still, in the harsh lights of the lab. It was a practical shape, yes, but it gave him chills.

When the camera feed appeared on his screen, he immediately noticed that the sample was significantly larger, bloated and almost smothering the shard of rock. The black substance seemed to pulse.

Shocked, James rushed to check on the environment within the containment vessel. It had a far higher concentration of oxygen than he would have expected. The air pressure and temperature were also high. Shaking his head, James backed away from the monitor and tried to come to terms with what must have happened. Nadya gave it glucose. She fed it, and now it had grown.

When she came in, James wasted no time demanding an answer.

"What? It was a perfectly valid thing to do."

"No, you imbecile! We were supposed to be find ways to destroy it, not make it bigger!"

"Um...all right. I gave it maybe a quarter liter, okay. It won't be the end of the world."

"You've never seen what it does! Quick, we need to kill it now."

James hurried to his monitor and quickly went through his options. Temperature could go up to two thousand Kelvin. He could try asphyxiating it. Pump the vessel full of superacid. The latter option seemed to be the best. Rip the thing apart on the molecular level.

"Woah there, doc, no need to go full out on this thing yet."

"What are you talking about."

"It hasn't done anything yet. We should watch it for a bit longer and find out what it does in this state."

"No! I already know what it does. None of it's good."

"Ok, let's compromise. I'll leave the sterilization procedure. If we ever think it could break containment, we can kill it with the press of a button. Please."

George found himself in the port complex almost without realizing it. It looked like any one of the hundreds of commercial docks in the solar system, with rows of airlocks following the gentle curve of the Facem's hull and a simple magnetic rail system to handle cargo in nil g. The walls were, naturally, white, with thick black text hanging above each airlock.

He walked up to the one labeled "A104" and stared out at the field of stars on the other side. In the last few hours, George had noticed that the starship was in a slight roll, and now he could see it in the slight leftward motion of the starfield.

He watched them slip by until finally he heard the boom and click of a docking spacecraft. A nearby airlock swung open soon after, and out came a man dressed in a blue naval pressure suit. He called out through the local comm network.

"I've been trying to contact you for an hour now, Ensign. Why the radio silence?"

George shrugged. "You should have shouted louder. I couldn't hear anything."

"Okay, listen, just shut up and get in the dropship. We have to get off this thing before the admiral orders a corrective burn. I don't wanna be caught in that. Let's go!"

He did as he was told, flying through the circular airlock and into the cramped, unpressurized cockpit of the dropship. The navy man, Shen, followed suit, and took the helm. The bulge of Gaea shone from through the small windows, orange and white swirls bright against the black.

When the Facem began its failed burn, the dropship was already hundreds of kilometers distant, and Shen was waiting for permission to bring it in for a landing. George was watching it through one of the navigation scopes. It was sad sight, the stuttering burst of white followed by silence. He continued watching it for another hour before Shen started getting antsy. He was about to ask what it was when the man died.