Chapter Text
I was in a stasis pod those two weeks. On the fifteenth day, I had awakened, the recycled air drying my nostril. Soon, I wouldn’t be on this ship, with its claustrophobic walls and sole compartment. I was glad to be arriving home, but it would have been nice if my people had any thought in passenger comfortability.
Outside the observation window, I could see the verdant glow of Cana’hla in the distance. It was just a barely noticeable dot, and then it began to increase in size. I could begin to make out details: the green mountains; the cobalt blue of the Latarja Sea; the palaces that led down to our underground sanctuaries I had longed to recreate on Earth but could never match the prodigious beauty of the originals. My home world, drawing closer and closer every moment as the hydra cell looped me underneath the moon, propelling me into the atmosphere.
I had to hide my sole excitement, or else drive myself insane with zeal. It had been a long time since I had felt such joyous emotions. I allowed myself to forget about the torture that I endured from the humans, about the years I spent mourning the grisly deaths of my friends. All of this has led me back to Cana’hla. I persevered. I made it!
I was home!
The globe was now as massive as the energy surging through me. I tapped onto the interface and made sure I would be able to hit the magnetic field at the right angle, to keep the Aeneas from destabilizing when I landed. I wish I could say that I made a graceful landing when I hit the magnetosphere, that I managed to pass through without any risky maneuvers or power surges.
I didn’t.
Yes, the Aeneas was an advanced ship. And yes, this type of spacecraft was the premier vessel for the Chiefs. But it was over twenty years old now. We progressed fast as a species. Who knows what we might have come up with in twenty-one years? This ship would have been an antique. A long-forgotten satellite that had fallen back to the atmosphere. Or worse: an unidentified craft.
The now burning Aeneas shook violently as I punched through the atmosphere, the windows now blotted by the flames of reentry. My bones were vibrating from the speed, my skin smoldering from the heat. This spacecraft had not made an interstellar trip in the past two decades. There was a forty-two percent chance that the hydra cell would overheat and rupture. Besides, we never even entered the Earth’s atmosphere intentionally—the Aeneas was shot out of the sky. By the humans.
“Damn them,” I found myself muttering again when power to the ship shut down for a moment. It restarted almost immediately, but I was still worried. I was not ready to make another emergency water landing. Well, unless you considered being shot down by a nuclear weapon and unconsciously crashing into the ocean a “water landing." At the very last moment, I managed to put the ship in a rotary maneuver, slowing my descent. Once the spinning stopped, I pushed the hydra cell into a fission blast, cooling the ship off; if I had pushed the hydra cell to full power in reentry, it would have overheated and blown the Aeneas to pieces. But pushing it subsequent to my arrival into the airspace of Cana’hla, with the rushing air now depleting the heat, I could allow the hydra cell to stop the overheating altogether. I wouldn’t want to fly the Aeneas into space again, but I would survive.
I steered the Aeneas in the same tower I launched from all those years ago. It took me just a fraction of the time to approach it, coming in at about three and a half hours. It was on the other side of the continent. Landing on that tower brought back a myriad of memories. Suddenly, I had a longing to see what changes had been made to the world while I was away. I wanted to see my family.
The Aeneas jolted to a stop on the tower. As my fingers traveled to shut the ship off, I hesitated. This colossal piece of machinery I used to make my way home, I was about to leave it behind. Hopefully for good. But part of me was uncertain, as peculiar as it sounds. A relatively large chunk of my life was spent on Earth. Hell, I was afraid of what would happen if I left all of that behind, if I stopped looking over my shoulder every day.
Then, after all these years, I deplaned the Aeneas, climbed down the tower, and stepped onto the soft ground of my world.