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"Do you remember what you put in it?" Booker asks.
Nile nods but doesn't take her eyes off her work. She flicks back and forth from the touch screens on the central console and the main viewscreen across the wall at the front of the bridge. Sunk deep in her concentration, she watches her plotted course recalibrate itself across the constantly shifting asteroid field.
Their circular bridge was large enough for the five of them to work without knocking elbows, but small enough that she could track the data across the big screen without squinting hard. However it wasn't large enough for Booker to occupy himself with another task while he waited for the recalibration routines to finish.
He lounged on the floor with his legs stretched out over the top of the steps, slowly rolling up the sleeves on his dark green jumpsuit. The colour clashes badly with the light orange walls and the charcoal carpet tiles, but he remains adamant about wearing it despite the misorder. The rest of them are decked out in their standard colours, navy and maroon, with the captain’s pips neatly clipped to Joe’s collar.
"What was it?" Booker asks in sing-song.
There's a scoff from the captain's chair, and while Nile could only see the top of his hair over the headrest, she knew that Joe was laughing.
"Isn't that the whole point of waiting, Book?" quips Joe.
There's a scratchy, disjointed noise as Booker scoots down the carpet over the bridge's steps from the end of her console. When he reaches the bottom step with a thud, he looks up at Joe with the same expression of mild curiosity. "Do you remember what you put in, Captain?"
Joe frowns back over the side of his chair at Booker and then glances up at Nicky, who smiles back. "You had pigments from Earth. To see if they would match."
Snapping his finger, Joe exclaims, "New ores! Yes, I remember now. "
There's a faint crackle over the open comms and then Quỳnh chimes in from the engine room. "Go on then, what did you put in, Book?"
Before Booker can answer, Nicky cuts in dryly. "Wine."
A ripple of laughter fills the bridge at his expense. It's cut off when a clatter echoes down the speakers and Quỳnh's swearing. "That's left a dent...but Book, that's boring! We were only going to come back because of a supply run, but alcohol? We had replicators back then too!"
Booker huffs indignantly from the bottom of the steps. "No, you can't replicate vintages-"
"-They're unique." Quỳnh and Nicky finish off for him in unison.
Scrunching his nose, Booker sighs dramatically, hair flopping in his face. "Float me. Someone. Anyone." When no one responds, he shrugs his shoulders. "It was from the Malta vineyard."
"It was from the last batch of summer wine, wasn't it?" Joe says with a warm smile. "We picked those berries together, before flight training, before Quỳnh and Nicky came back from the Venus job."
The memory of it is as strong as the summer sunshine they had left behind and Nile can recall herself underneath the twisting vines, plucking bunches and tasting the sweet fruit burst under her teeth. They had pressed the grapes themselves, and then collected the bottles before they left for the stars. The bottles had been left for special occasions, drunk on anniversaries and not-birthdays, and once when they had all missed their home planet a little too much, and a bottle of the summer wine had been brought out to share. One by one, over their first full decade in space, they had depleted the batch, and now, more than a century later, Nile hadn’t thought there was any left.
Nile smiles at the thought, and then looks up at the speakers. "Quỳnh! Do you remember what you put in?"
She has to hold back her laughter as Quỳnh's swearing crackles down the comms while she wrestles with whatever she dropped. There's metallic clanking and hissing that seems to grow louder, and she wonders if she'll have to run down to help if something's bent out of shape or broken, but then there's a small sigh of relief.
Over a rush of static, Quỳnh replies, "It was gloves, from my first spacewalk.”
"That was a good one," says Joe.
"Thank you, Captain.”
Her light sarcasm from his approval makes Joe chuckle. “It was almost as sentimental as Nicky’s favourite novels."
"So come on, Nile." Booker asks with his curiosity doubled. "What did you put in the time capsule?"
Nile rolls her eyes in good-humour, content with keeping that small secret close to her chest. "Captain's right. You're just going to have to wait until we dig it back up again to find out."
"So, how long will it take for us to get there? Nicky asks her with a mischievous smile on his lips.
With a flick of her fingers, she shares the plotted course on the main viewscreen for all to see. The black screen dissolves into a star chart. A thick red line zigzags across thick bands of asteroids, and an icon of their ship slides over it before looping back on repeat.
"Our new course has been fully calibrated," Nile reports. "We have a path through the asteroid field and our ETA to Lykon Base is between six and seven hours, depending on any corrections from rogue collision trajectories. We'll be ready to go as soon as Quỳnh has the engine back online."
Booker gets to his feet and jogs back to his station, taking care to poke Nicky in the side as he slipped behind him. Nile bats Booker’s hand away as he passes her and focuses on rearranging her console to leave the scanners running to pick up any asteroid collisions. The autopilot would kick in to adjust and keep them on track, but she preferred to have a hand on the wheel just in case.
"Engines are online and powered up." Quỳnh's voice filters down the comms line. "Ready when you are, Captain. I'll head up in a minute."
Joe nods and twists in his seat. "Shields?"
Hands tucked behind his back, Nicky confirms, "Fully restored and ready."
"Booker?"
"Warp drive ready," says Booker. "Fully powered up, speed matched to our course."
There's a moment of anticipation that rolls around the bridge as they watch the little ship icon reset to the start of their new path and pause there. In the captain's chair, Joe adjusts his back to sit straighter and his arms drop on the rests until he looks every inch of a mission leader. The feeling spreads across the room, and Nile finds herself standing a little taller behind him.
Then he gives the order they've all been waiting for; "Let's go."
They arrive at Lykon Base only six hours later, just as the ship slips into its night cycle and the lights dim a fraction. Booker locks them into a standard orbit around the asteroid and then walks around to relieve Joe from his chair for the night shift.
Glad for not drawing that short straw, Nile leans against the side of her console and gives a dramatic yawn, complete with exuberant arm stretching and tendons clicking in her shoulders as the day's strain is wrung out of them. The siren call of her bunk beckons her, even if it's for a few hours' sleep before they hit the surface for the retrieval mission. She watches Quỳnh and Nicky fight their own yawns as they plod along to the door.
"Hang on, hang on!" Joe calls from halfway out of his chair.
They all halt.
He looks over the read out on his screen. "I'm picking up frequencies from the surface."
A ripple of shock runs through Nile. She lunges back to her console and reawakens her screens. Half a second behind her, Nicky and Booker slap their hands on their stations, and Quỳnh sprints back to pull on her headset. There’s a long moment of silence and frantic tapping from all of them as they assess the situation.
"Knock knock." Nicky mutters under his breath.
He overlays their ship's radars to create a new surface level map that slowly buffers on the viewscreen. Inch by inch, they see an infrared image swipe across with blotches in shades of red, orange and yellow across what had once been a solidly purple surface.
"Who's there?" Nile whispers back, feeling the adrenaline stir up in the pit of her stomach.
They had chosen this spot as a safe base because it was a small, uninhabited rock away from any major shipping routes. Banking on the sheer impossibility that no one would ever stumble on it because it was a lump of rock in a vacuum of rocks.
Joe leans forward in his chair and there’s a hint of awe in his voice, "Someone resourceful.”
Nile silently agrees with him. She had put money on it, that this hideaway would last them at least two centuries.
Having retaken his seat, he drums his fingers against his leg. “What do you have, my love?”
"The largest heat signature is about ten clicks from our landing spot." Nicky zooms into the hotspot, fingers gently reaching out in the air towards the oranges and reds of life. "It's consistent with a fully occupied base. We're too far away for a precise scan, but I'd say we're looking at life signs in the hundreds. Maybe close to a thousand."
"I'm picking up faint but recent energy trails of dilithium in the upper atmosphere and around orbiting range. Likelihood of flight and the capability to pursue." Booker calls out, rubbing worriedly at his chin.
Slipping off her headset, Quỳnh swings her chair around as her results are transferred over to the viewscreen. Audio files pop up in their dozens and a quiet jumble of voices play out. Nile closes her eyes and listens as the sounds of life wash over her.
"Nicky’s right. This base is burned." Quỳnh reports. "I'm picking up chatter. Mostly French and Arabic, but there's some Standard mixed in there too. It seems non-confrontational. Usual hub noise. I don't think they've picked us up yet, and no mentions of security or hostility."
"No, it's unlikely,” says Joe. “We've come in on the dark side of the planet. Unless they’re on high alert, they won’t see us for a few hours."
As he falls silent as he considers the data on screen, Nile pulls a copy of the heat scan to her console to take a closer look. The flick of adrenaline that spikes from her heart is a mix of awe and worry. The ability to disappear into the shadows was something they hadn't experienced until they had left Earth behind because the effort it took to remain unknown while completely visible had come with too many close calls.
Space had offered their small family the chance of greater freedom, and the security that when they needed to disappear, they could. The broad horizons also offered them the chance to return to what they did best. Help was so often needed, and while there were new dangers, their desire to do some good never faltered.
Yet since the first few ships set out to build bases on far flung planets, there had inevitably been more and more pushing on into the dark. The lure of the blank map edges never faded, and those far-off stars called small ships with daring crews onwards, from one shining beacon to the next.
Of course, Nile thinks, there would be someone mad or brave or intrepid enough to wind up here. A rock with nothing going for it.
"It's a dead end." Quỳnh muses aloud, thinking along the same lines.
Across the room, Nicky feet shuffle and then he comes to slouch against the side of his console. His voice is lighter than the theirs as he also comes to terms with the unexpected. "That's what made it perfect."
"We'll need to rethink how we choose our bases," Joe concedes, feeling the loss of security too. "But we've made the trip here for a good reason, and I'm not ready to turn back."
He waits for a moment, but no one disagrees. With a rap of his fingers on the arm rests, he sets them to work.
"We'll do an overt retrieval. Quỳnh, Hail them, let them know we're here, non-hostile, and will be landing tomorrow to pick up supplies. Keep the line open over the night cycle, and any communication to a minimum."
"Will do." She picks up her headset again and taps away on her touch screen to set up a channel.
“Nile, we need our evac. Three decoys and one solid.”
“Yes, Captain,” she says.
With an eye on the viewscreen displaying the slowly refining scans, Nile starts charting three potential escape routes and a more complicated course which would keep them on the far side of the planet, before jumping them out to even more obscure coordinates. She's learnt that so long as there was a haystack nearby with solar radiation or asteroid rings or magnetic storms, no one would bother diving into the deep behind them.
When Booker waves his free hands at her, she splits the next task of priming the space-bots to leave those fake trails as misdirection, if they were followed. They work quickly and quietly in a way that's been honed over an immeasurable number of years until Nile shakes out her cramping fingers and sighs. The route was complicated and would involve a couple of tight barrel rolls that very few pilots could pull off, but it’d give them the edge to make it back into the asteroid field.
Taking advantage of her lapse in attention, Booker nudges her arm. “Do you think this means no wine?"
He asks with the same nonchalance he uses to share the fact that he's used up all the hot water knowing the tank would need a full ten minutes to reheat and Nile playfully kicks out at him without looking. Booker jumps back to dodge, but his hands never leave the console, and he hums as her frown melts away.
“We could always do an '64.” Nile says without looking up.
"I knew it!” He hisses in delight. “You put something important in the time capsule!"
She shakes her head. "You'll see what it is when we dig it up.”
"Fine. But I want to be on lookout if we have to do '64. I'm not running point again."
"I dunno, Book. I thought you did well when things got sticky." Nile squints thoughtfully as she recalls the mission. It had been marked down as successful, in the end, which was the main thing really.
"I was suspended over a nuclear reactor for three hours!"
There's a look of horrified betrayal slapped across his face, and she thinks it's kinda worth taking the time to remember the whole of that mission. After some concentrating, she recalls the long wait, the fan system they hadn’t been able to hack, and shaking out her boots when they’d been reunited back on the ship.
'We're in space.” Nile says in a tone as dry as the Madigorian sand dunes, but it's at odds with the little gleam in her eye. “It’s cold outside. At least you had the nuclear reactor. You weren’t the one snapping your toes off from frostbite at the end of it.”
He considers the point. "So does this mean you volunteering to take point?"
Looking up from her screen, Nile winks back. "I wouldn't have suggested it otherwise."
"Quiet on the bridge, please." Joe calls out. "Are you ready to transmit?"
Quỳnh gives a thumbs-up. "Yes. In three, two-" She holds up one finger and then switches on the comms to record.
"This is Lieutenant Quỳnh of the private starship The Andromache. We are currently in a standard orbit around what we have on our charts to be Lykon Base. Our purpose is to land and pick up supplies previously stored here by our astro-benefactors. We’re sending charts, claimant paperwork, and our ship specifications to you. The batch also contains transcripts of this audio message in Standard, Neo-French, Arabic, and Mandarin. This line will remain open and the audio will loop. We await your response."
She presses her screen and a little envelope icon twirls around before disappearing on itself.
In the end, no one had to be suspended in space.
A video message comes through a few minutes later. A rumpled looking woman around her late forties with blue rimmed glasses clears her throat onscreen. She makes direct eye contact with the camera and smiles thinly, but there’s determination in the curve that Nile’s seen so often in the smaller communities that have sprung up in the most unlikely of places.
There’s an unflinching grit to this woman too, right down to the way her brown eyes bore down into the camera and her tan skin flushes along her cheeks once she starts talking.
"This is Base Manager Kira Adlawan. Message received. You are to communicate with the airfield crew and land at the specified coordinates at your convenience. We look forward to receiving you."
The welcome is warmer than they expected.
Kira Adlawan is waiting as the ramp folds down with no qualms about standing in front of the unknown ship. Her vibrant blue suit is a lighter shade than their navy uniforms, and Nile finds her thoughts drifting off in the common colour, with memories of dipping her toes in the sea.
With his uniform fully buttoned up to the collar and his captain’s pips buffed up to a shine, Joe breaks the line at the top of the ramp and heads down with a confident stride. His crew follows.
Nicky is on his heels, long hair neatly pulled back in a half-bun, and his bright eyes scan across to check their new surroundings, as any First Mate would do. It's a united front they've used for many introductions and first contacts. Quỳnh is behind him, gracefully keeping up pace with a finger tucked in her belt loop above her hostered stun gun, just in case. Still in his green uniform, Booker was at her side with a pad tucked under his arm, completing a secondary duo act that backed up their command. Stepping off the ramp last, Nile swings her long braids over her shoulder, relishing the fresher taste of air outside of their ship.
Together, they look the part of private cargo handlers even as they exit the slightly battered, aging ship, but the sentimentality of it is easily explained away. In their crisp, uniforms and polished boots, there’s no mistaking their professionalism as they line up on the dock behind their captain.
"Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain al-Tayyib." Kira greets in Standard with a diplomatic smile.
Joe beams back at her. “Pleasure to be here, Base Manager Adlawan. We never thought a simple retrieval job would mean making new friends.”
They shake hands, and after a quick round of introductions, Kira’s smile softens into something more natural under the influence of Joe’s disarming charm. With a grateful nod to the docking crew, she leads them through open doors. “If you’d follow me, I’ll show you our base.”
Nile brings up the rear, taking her time looking over the small airfield crew who’ve congregated nervously by the far doors. The dry dock is small, with room for either one large starship like The Andromache, or potentially two smaller ones at a squeeze. The lack of rigging catches her eye as she goes but when she spots the neatly folded down beams and packed tools it reminds her of the very first dock she saw in deep space, and how the workers managed to make everything around them function with the fewest supplies.
From Nicky’s scans they already knew the base was laid out in a pinwheel shape with a central unit and outer units dividing off. But it’s a different look inside where they’ve modelled it as a wide open space, like a town square, complete with grass and wildflowers between the walkways. The dome’s high ceiling is easy on the eyes too, with the soft blue of Earth’s dawn projected up over them.
“This is…” Quỳnh trails off and her eyes are wide as she takes it all in.
“I know.” Nile says with the same breathless wonder.
A large crowd had already gathered around the wooden pole in the centre of the main square. As they get closer, Nile sees the arrow signs nailed to it facing every direction, each with little images of places and their distances. She leans across to tap Nicky, and points out the one for Earth, complete with its own little blue-green circle painted on.
'It's beautiful," he whispers.
"We don't get many visitors here. We thought we were the first to land,” says Kira. “I say we, but I should explain better. Seventy-three Earth years ago, the Zhinü crash landed here on the way to its final destination in the Beta Quadrant.
“A long journey for those days,” says Nicky.
Kira nods back. “It was a settler ship, full to the brim with basic terraforming equipment and whatever else a base needed to kick-start itself."
"So they took a look outside and decided to stick around?" Booker asks curiously.
He looks over the railings to see the crowd craning their necks up to look at the visitors. Beside him, Joe leans over to wave. Quỳnh joins him, seeing the patchwork of humanity that had carved its life into what had been a very grey, very lifeless rock.
"The ship had been heavily damaged, and they had lost a significant number of crewmembers in the crash." Kira replies.
Joe turns back to face her. "We're sorry to hear that."
Kira looks solemnly. "Out of adversity, hope.”
His eyes brighten at the phrase, and Nile quirks an eyebrow at him over Kira’s shoulder. They hold eye contact for a moment before Joe’s attention returns to Kira. "Wise words."
Although Nile makes the effort to hide her smile away, she can’t dampen her sincerity. "Sounds like good advice for solar storm days."
She turns to wave down at a little girl in purple trousers within the crowd calling up greetings in all four of the languages she knew. As soon as the girl spots her waving back, her enthusiasm doubles and her jumps become higher. Nile raises a second hand and waves faster, which sends the girl into fits of laughter, and amuses all the adults around her. Other children begin to copy the game too, so by the time Nicky and Quỳnh join in, and from the look of the adults who had begun to smile up at them, any doubts that their arrival had brought unwelcome trouble to their door melts away.
"It's actually a motto we've adopted from the original crew." Kira laughs to herself. "I should also give you a small warning, there's a few surviving members of the Zhinü who are mildly pissed that they can no longer claim to be the first to set foot here. They were under the assumption it was a space bot that delivered the supplies you’ve come to collect."
"It was a passing visit, so it doesn’t really count." Booker says before catching himself. "I mean, it was a supply drop. Our astro-benefactors, they never had plans to settle. Probably never imagined that the place would look like this in less than a century."
He looks back down at the crowd. "You've done something impossible, and more so, you've turned it into a home."
Satisfied with their understanding, Kira continues her explanation about the base as they walk on.
"Seventy-five years is a long time. The base has grown, and still is growing. We've been taking in refugees from the border skirmishes, and we've got a few returners from transport liners scattered around too. They tend to retire early and bring their families along because it's a guaranteed quiet life here."
She leads them off from the upper platform and towards a staircase where they come face to face with an immutable human behaviour older than all of their years put together. It's a sight more recognisable to Nile and she steps past to reach out and touch the mural painted onto the wall. The heavy texture of the paint tells her it's been recycled from spare materials, nothing sophisticated or exclusively shipped in from Earth, but it makes it all the more special as the bright oranges, teals, and yellows blend together beautifully just like the graffiti art of her childhood city.
“Ah, we encourage our people to foster their talents. It’s almost completed, but we’re waiting for someone to volunteer for that space.” Kira points to an unpainted patch, “And that section, there, was the most recent. It was actually done by a hauler who had been grounded for a day with a faulty engine.”
Nile has to tear her eyes away as they keep moving, but there are patterns and images to decipher, and she promises herself that she’ll come back to take another look.
They get to the ground and Kira shoos off the gathered crowd to go about their normal business. A few people trail away slower, keen to catch any extra gossip on the new arrivals, but she waits them out and eventually their path is fully clear.
A flash of worry crosses her face and she clears her throat. "Before we get any further, I have to confess. One of the main reasons why the original crew didn't try to repair the ship and continue to the Beta Quadrant was because they found the supplies your benefactors had left here, and brought most of it back. A lot of it was standard equipment, and they decided to make use of it."
"We thought as much." Nile says, feeling the gentle spring of real grass under her boots.
"But we will recompense anything you need.” Kira adds quickly. “And we have other, useful items that a long-haul starship like yours could do with."
Joe takes a moment to make a show of thinking on the offer. "We were mostly interested in the solar-quark batteries that had been stored here. They could have been retro-engineered with upgrades and reused."
Taking her eyes off the square and the directions pole, and the sight of more people together than she’d seen in over half a century, Nile watches how Kira squares her shoulders imperceptibly. It was the look of someone ready to go to bat for her people and face up to consequences of her forebears’ actions for survival. In some ways, existence in space ranged from cut-throat business deals mixed in with much-needed acts of goodwill. Nile knew that Joe wouldn’t push Adlawan. When they had dropped off the supplies all those years ago, they had been equally prepared to never return.
But after minimal thinking time, Kira has an offer. "Your communique contained basic info for landing, and I noticed you have a first-gen ship. Our original supplies were also first-gen and we've done well with upkeep and repairs, so we have good equivalent tech we can give to you, even help install if you'd like."
Keeping his face neutral, Joe points over her shoulder. "And is that a sign for a bio-garden?"
"Yes. We have a seed bank of all our plants. You're welcome to take samples."
With an agreeable hum, Joe reaches out a hand. "That sounds agreeable to us, Base Manager Adlawan."
Kira shakes it, a little stunned that there was no backlash or threats of lawyers and double-demands.
“I look forward to doing business with you, Captain al-Tayyib. Now, would you like to rest and enjoy some of our hospitality, or would you prefer to visit your benefactor’s original landing site?”
Joe tips his head back to glance at his crew, and then flashes her a blinding smile. “It has been a long trip, but I think we’ll see the landing site first.”
Quỳnh jostles as the buggy runs over a dip, and Nile winces as her weight presses on her knees. Booker tries to scoop Quỳnh's feet closer so she wouldn't fall from the next incline or dip.
"We should have put you in the cargo hold." Nile grumbles as she readjusts her leg from going numb.
There's not enough room inside the loaned buggy to stretch out, but she shuffles her foot forwards so she could flex her calf muscles before pins and needles set in. They had been warned that the buggy could fit four at best, but none of them wanted to wait behind, so out went the seat padding and other furnishings. The exposed frame that had been left behind didn't cushion them enough to stop Nile's teeth from rattling.
"You could have gone in the hold." Quỳnh points out.
She wriggles more from her awkward position, sitting sideways on Nile's legs and stretching out over Booker. The movement doesn't help much, and she ends up leaning forward more with her back curved against the side of the door to avoid hitting her head with every jolt.
Nile rolls her eyes, arms hooked around Quỳnh’s waist as they hit another bump. "You're shorter!"
"Is this how you treat your elders?' Quỳnh demands. "You stuff them into the cargo hold of a rover? You would just stuff me in there? Like I was a pile of geology samples? Or a box of batteries? Your favourite immortal sister!"
"Your only immortal sister." Booker tacks on the correction while Quỳnh’s laments continue on.
"Like a crate of meal bars? Or Booker's shitty wine-"
"-Hey!"
"No, it's true for most of the time." Nile nods along thoughtfully. "And I don’t want to be the one to say this, but the wine's probably vinegar by now."
Feeling the tables turn, Booker scoffs. "And if it's not, I'm not sharing with you."
“More wine for me then!” Quỳnh declares triumphantly.
Nile shifts again, eliciting a yelp from Quỳnh as she’s almost unbalanced. For the umpteenth time, they dissolve into bickering as Booker pulls rank which he hasn't held for nearly three decades, and gets jabbed in the ribs for it. When Quỳnh swings her head back and swears there's more room if she just shifts a bit this way, Nile has to spit Quỳnh's long hair out from her mouth. The volume quickly increases and they're all ready to poke and shove and wrestle in the enclosed space.
There's a knock on the tinted divider separating them from the front cabin that makes them freeze. They all turn to see it's Nicky, leaning his face against the glass so that his cheek was pressed flat.
"What's going on back there?" he asks.
"Yeah, we're hearing a lot of raised voices." Joe calls over his shoulder, stifling a laugh. "You're going to use up all the oxygen!"
"Oxygen? You can't-" Nile groans loudly, jamming her face in Quỳnh's shoulder. "Oh, you're all the worst!"
The cave is lit up by a single flood light mounted on a metal pole. It casts a harsh pool of white light that reflects off the bumpy, dark walls. Between the five of them, it was a quick job to retrieve the last few boxes of extra cabling and ship panelling that the original settlers had left behind. They loaded up the gravity trolley, and then started on the main task of digging up their time capsule.
Shin deep in the hole, Nile tosses another shovelful of dirt out, just as Joe’s next scoop hits metal on metal.
“Pay dirt!" Nicky crows and drops his trowel.
The rest of their tools hit the ground with muted clangs. The five of them form a loose circle around the lump, and feel for the edges and handles on the capsule. It gets hauled up and dropped on the cave floor with a soft thunk, and the last bits of soft dirt pressed to the outside fall off in small heaps like clodded damp sand at the beach.
Lifting his arms in triumph, Joe slaps at his wrist panel to play a recording of a trumpet fanfare. Then he stoops back down to key in the code they had set. The latch over the front pops open. It strikes her a little silly, but Nile feels the urge to applaud, but when Quỳnh catches her eye from the other side of the circle, it seems to be a feeling shared and they hi-five over the top of Joe’s head.
"Family." Joe addresses them softly as he looks up around the circle. "Joy of my joys, we have retraced our steps and returned to collect these things our past selves left for us."
Slowly, he lifts the lid and takes out a sealed flask of wine with a small coin purse duct taped to it. "Book, this is yours."
Booker accepts it, fingers running over the top cork to find it still wedged in place. "We are in luck. No vinegar here."
Crouching down beside Joe, he takes his turn to lift out the next treasure and hands Nicky the two sci-fi books he had put in for safekeeping. Then Quỳnh leans over to be passed hers. With a soft cheer, she swaps out her new black gloves for her old orange and white striped ones, relishing in the comfortable fit she had missed. Joe is next to collect his box of stored pigments from her, tucking it close to his chest.
Nile waits patiently for him to take out the last item at the bottom of the capsule, a piece of folded paper.
Joe places it in her outstretched hand with an easy smile. "A reminder?"
"Sort of.” She grins back.
Booker leans in, checking that there was nothing left behind inside the capsule. “A list?”
Quỳnh whistles, and the sound echoes sweetly around the cave. "That's deep. Deeper than wine, anyway."
"And engraved coins." Booker says as he jangles the purse in the air. "These were some of my best work. Your chin, dear sister, was deceptively hard to capture."
"I want to see!"
Rocking forwards on her heels, Quỳnh jumps over the hole. Booker groans dramatically before pulling her into a sideways hug, and he drops the purse in her open palms. Laughing at their antics, Joe steps around them to strap his box of rocks to the gravity trolley.
"What was your list about, Nile?" Nicky asks as he zips his books into his jacket pockets for safekeeping.
She smooths out the wrinkles on the page, glad they had sprung for the atmosphere-regulating capsule. Otherwise she might have been left with a pile of mush or dust that would have blown her letters away when the lid was opened. The paper feels thin and precious under her fingers, and she brushes her thumb over her old, looped handwriting. It was different now, less cursive and more blockish after a long distance graduate course and reverting back to hasty notes scribbled down on recycled paper to meet the ever-present deadlines.
"I had written a list of things I thought I might see before we came back here. It's something my mom got me and my brother to do at the start of the summer holidays. Like all the fun things we wanted to do, and then we'd get to help each other to do them."
Her eyes start watering as a surge of nostalgia overtakes her.
"I kind of remember… there was this one summer, where both of us put down going to the beach. And the car broke down on the way there, and I got stung by a jellyfish...and to her it probably felt like a disaster, but I still remember it. She bought us cookies for the ride home and the chocolate chips melted on our fingers."
"It's the little things." Nicky nods.
Nile holds her breath, holds onto the memory for another moment. "Sharing the cookies on the drive home from the beach."
"How did you do?" asks Booker.
Skimming over the lines, Nile sees what she had left for herself: Check in on my brother’s descendants. Camping on Mons Olympus. Fly Parsek's canyon in thirty seconds. Ride a solar flare for at least a light year!
“Most of it. The solar flare on the Avanis mission was the longest. I saw Sora on Titan, and Ibrahim on Hub One. He was one of the architects for the new space shuttle they were developing. And it was about two decades after leaving here that we all met back on Mons Olympus. Do you remember how orange the sky was in the mornings?"
Nicky smiles at the memory. "It was beautiful. We should go back there."
“You only have the canyon left. Not bad, Nile." Quỳnh remarks. "We should try it the next time we're there. I think thirty-one seconds is still the record."
"A new record waiting to be set by ace-pilot Nile Freeman. I remember Avanis was our quickest getaway ever!" Joe declares, raising his arms at her and mock-bowing.
"I'm out of practise." Nile shakes her head as they all groan loudly at her, and then she relents. "But I guess it's like riding a bike...which none of us have done in, how long has it been?"
Jumping back across the hole, Quỳnh drapes her arm over Nile's shoulder and squeezes her close. "That's the spirit!"
Wanting to keep the list close, Nile carefully folds up the paper and slides it into her trouser pocket. She sighs happily as Joe and Nicky check on the trolley for a final time before waving them over. Ready to help steer it back, Booker stretches his arms and heads towards the cave entrance with Quỳnh.
“All good to go?" asks Joe. "We can see the seed bank if we get back before the end of the day shift.”
Nile hovers beside the open capsule. The pile of sandy dirt sags on one side, and she toes at it so some falls back into the hole. It leaves her boot print behind and a new thought hits her.
"You head out." Nile replies as the others head towards the trolley. "Start loading up the hold. I just need a few more minutes here."
"Five minutes, max." says Joe.
She gives him a little salute. "Sure thing, Captain."
Quỳnh happily flexes her gloves as she sets the trolley aloft. "Adlawan said they'd have a buffet in the canteen waiting for us. Although...maybe we should bring something for the table?"
Nicky tugs on her gloved hand. "I put the slow cooker on before we left."
“Tonight, we feast!” Quỳnh grins back approvingly.
The four of them clip their helmets back on, and Joe leaves Nile's behind for her. Taking a corner of the trolley each, they guide it out from the cave, talking about dishes and spices, and the diplomatic value of sharing old Earth cuisine with new friends.
As they go, Nile lifts the flood light and picks out a careful path to the back of the cave. She takes her time to avoid the lumpy rocks that could lead to a briefly twisted ankle. The black rock glimmers faintly where the light catches on the crystals in the ore lines spreading out like thin spiderwebs.
When she had come here, the first time, it had been only her footprints leaving a trail. But now, there were many, criss-crossing over, obscuring her tread from where the base settlers had come in and taken away the supplies. Their prints cluster together around the flattest patch of the rockface, boots all pointing the same way like visitors at an art gallery. Her feet settle into the sandy dips between them, in them, and maybe even find her old ones.
With a smile on her face and a deep swell of joy in her heart, Nile reaches up to touch the laser carving she had left behind on a whim in an old dialect of Standard.
Out of adversity, hope. Lykon Base, 3076.