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On the third night, the blaring alarms outside and flickering bright lights within her resting place forced Ariane's muscles to twitch and constrict with the unfortunate coming of consciousness.
She had felt the thud when the ship crashed. Centuries old water from the cryochamber shivered in their thick stagnation and her stomach had recoiled—either from the harsh landing or the taste of liquid death slipping past her parted lips. She ignored it then, ignored the reality that existed outside of her watery tomb. What could she have done? Elster was gone. Most of her flesh was gone. There was nothing out there for her except the reminders of her own shortcomings.
But that alarm would not stop itself—not for another few years. Ariane's fingers curled into a fist, and she pulled her head out of the water to gasp for air. All she breathed in was the scent of chemicals and the rot of a corpse that should have decayed centuries ago. Still, rationality and the ability to think outside of survival returned to her brain that had been suffocating for far too long.
Her fingers searched for the control panel for the emergency opening. She never had to use it before. Elster had always been the one to wake her up—to beg her to eat, to have her look at the approaching stars. After her life support failed to resuscitate her, there was no one left to remain at her side. The cryochamber became the tomb to something that could not die.
The protective layers of screens and doors let out a wheezing sound as it unsuctioned from the chamber, and her eyes struggled to adjust to the sight of the room around her. It wasn't as ruined as she thought it would be—as it should have been. Dust particles danced into the empty air as she moved her body to sit upright. Everything remained as it had been before she went to sleep. The wheelchair Elster struggled to make for her still sat in the corner, staring at her. Her blood on the glass surface of the chamber was still fresh and warm.
Nothing had changed. She was still a corpse unable to die. Elster would not tiptoe into the room to check if she was alright. There was no hum of the engine propelling her further into deep space. This was all eternity was willing to give her.
Her legs, necrotic and bleeding from wounds she would reopen soon enough, did not fight against her as she stood up from the stagnant water. Clumps of hair and flesh floated in the water around her ankles. Blood stained every surface as she stepped out on to the cold steel floor—too cold. She felt the winter of Rotfront on her cheek, of the stench of smoke always coming from that ammunition factory across from her residential block. Her aunt told her once that she would get used to it. That her lungs would grow accustomed to the shallow air stolen by the smoke, but all that led to was more pills in the medicine cabinet.
Ariane slipped the thin robe laying on her wheelchair over her bare shoulders. It did nothing to help her against the encroaching threat of hypothermia, but there were still many mirrors on the ship that had yet to be broken. The sight of protruding bones, rot, and her own engravings were the last things she wanted to see when her eyes accidentally caught glance of a reflective surface.
She stepped out into the corridor. To her left, the alarm in her personal quarters deafened all other senses. To her right, smoke escaped from the reactor through the small cracks in the door.
If she survived three days without a nuclear meltdown, Ariane reasoned, then she could survive a few more minutes to turn off the alarm in her room.
The door was already open, expecting her arrival. Unlike the cryogenics, something had ruined her bedroom. A giant gash cut through the hull, and with it, debris and snow littered every surface in reach. The last painting she ever worked on had its colours faded and forgotten by the greedy, foreign air. Her treadmill, already having been abandoned after she got sick, was crumbled under the crushing weight of the rubble—along with her TV and many of the tapes that she still remembered each and every individual line of.
There was no sign of what caused the collapse. She had felt something hit the front of the ship but nowhere else. Perhaps she did not remember what really happened. Perhaps the hull's integrity had reached its expiration.
Ariane sighed and climbed on top of the rubble to reach the alarm. Her head spun with the ringing echoing off her eardrums and causing tears to swell. She remembered the safety drills her school did every month in case the city was ever attacked where the alarms and flashing lights left her mind unable to operate itself. Isa had to lend her earmuffs and guide her by the arm to the underground shelter before she collapsed in the middle of the hallway. After she graduated and moved away for training, the issue subsided, but now, every small sensation brought her ever closer to the brink of losing what little control she still had.
She used a sharp piece of debris to cut the wires from the alarm, and in an instant, everything was silent. There was the pounding of her racing heart unused to the simple motions that came with consciousness, but also the whistling of wind coming from outside. She had almost forgotten what it sounded like. The wind on Rotfront had been terrible, but she had fond memories of buying skirts too short with the sisters and trying not to make fools of themselves as they went out shopping. The last time they tried it, Erika fell into a puddle and got an infection from the dirty water. She tossed the alarm to the ground and tiptoed down from the heap of debris.
The cold air of an alien landscape froze the darkened cryogenic water to her skin like the icicles found on the corpses of explorers left out too long in the wild. Her blood was still warm and stubborn. A brief image of the sharp debris she discarded flashed in her mind.
Ariane shook her head and escaped from the cold room. Another time, then.
Facing the shut door of the reactor room felt like staring down a lurking predator that knew you were staring at it. Their radiation detectors had broken a few months into the first leak. It wasn't as if it was needed. Both of them knew by the melting of her skin and the fractures splintering Elster's metal covering that they had ran out of time. Elster was the first to go, perishing shortly after they went to bed, and Ariane…
Her fingertips burned as she touched the steel door. Some ancient concept of self-preservation begged her to stay away, to reach the cockpit and send out a distress signal. No one would find her. Wherever the Penrose crashed, it was not a place where she would find other people. No—if the ship was destined to be her only safe haven, she would have to embrace the predator waiting to consume her.
The door shrieked open. Scalding irradiated water rushed past her like the waves on Vineta's equator. New blood spilled as the skin around her ankles peeled and absorbed itself in the water, but her eyes were too fixated on the reactor itself to care.
A sharp whistle of steam damaged her ears and the thick cloud of black smoke over the ceiling threatened her with the memory of being rushed into surgery after her lungs collapsed. What was once the scariest night of her life would now be a welcomed end. The only fear that lingered was that it would not be enough—that she would be left to lay in the scalding waters unable to breathe, unable to die.
Ariane took a step forward, and the sensation of being watched settled on her shoulders. It came from above, in the sky obscured from her. She sensed it while she attempted to make a peaceful resting spot for Elster, while the ship crashed to the surface. It saw her—understood her, but she could not bring herself to acknowledge her unwanted watcher.
She felt its concern as she took another step towards the reactor, and her throat ached to speak.
"Are you going to stop me?" she asked. Her voice was too weak to hear herself, but something in the atmosphere changed. It continued to watch her but as something helpless. It would not stop her. It could not stop her.
Ariane drew in a deep breath and braced herself for the burning water to splash up towards her upper body as she picked up her pace to the reactor. She could no longer feel any sicker than she did, and her body's only warning against what she was handling was the vibrations in her skull growing more and more intense.
There was no logic in what she did next. She was not a mechanic. Elster once tried teaching her the basics, but no matter how many times she explained what each of her tools did and all the crafty mnemonic devices people smarter than either of them made, Ariane could never keep up beyond the basics her mother had to know as a radio operator.
Her hands wrapped around the joint where two pipes met—where the whistling steam came from—and cupped it as Elster had when a gash tore deep into her thigh. She no longer could recall why it happened in the first place. If it was done by her own hand or if she had collapsed while trying to walk unaided. The blood of her thigh—the irradiated water—pooled in the deep crevices of her hands, threatening to melt them, but for an instant, the whistling steam stopped. She could listen to the presence of her unseen watcher.
It refused to speak, but a thought that was not her own snuck into her mind. She did not have the strength to pull such a thing off as herself, but it urged her on.
Her scarred, bloodied knuckles protruded from what little skin she still had as she clenched the two pipes. The reactor itself screamed as one pipe slipped in towards the mess of wires and the other fell from the joint and dangled from her weak grip.
Ariane blinked. She could no longer see the reactor in front of her. Like the migraines she used to get while reading at the sisters' bookshop or the censored copies of movies the Nation would force her to watch in school, something distorted the reality around the reactor and her legs buckled and threatened to collapse. The smoke descended as heat reached unbearably close to her face.
She breathed in deep, and all she heard was the pipe falling from her grasp into the water before her vision went dark and she joined alongside it.
Bloodied, stagnant water rushed past her throat as she gasped awake. She was back in the confines of the cryochamber. There was no blaring alarms or flashing lights, but more than before, she felt the urgency to escape from her steel prison before something unknowable and dangerous occurred.
Ariane slammed her fist against the emergency control panel, and the protective cover of the chamber slid back to allow her to lift her head up and cough out the bitter blood and chemicals burning her throat. Even through the filth, she could see that her body looked even worse. She was still in the robe, now frayed and partially melted, and the skin from her calves down were charred black.
No one was watching her, but she was not alone.
Her fingers gripped the edge of the chamber for support only to find a hand already resting there. A hand of synthetic flesh and metallic bones.
She did not look towards her new companion, her eyes staying focused on the hideousness that had become her body. Her voice was even weaker than before, but she had to inquire.
"Elster?"
There was no response. The hand remained still.
"Elster, are you okay?"
Nothing but silence greeted her. Ariane looked over at what she had already predicted. Elster's corpse slept against the outer shell of her cryochamber. Synthetic blood was still rushing from her false organs as her metal exterior had vanished, as if dissected.
She hadn't died then. Ariane had trapped her in that glass tomb of wires without knowing that, somehow by some extent, she was still alive.
Her hand fell away from Elster's as she stood up. The cryogenics room was darker. The emergency lights had burnt out and were barely holding by their wires. Trash and debris gathered in the corners like something desperately trying to hide the truth.
Ariane tiptoed out of the chamber to avoid stepping on the loose bits of her partner and backed away towards the door. She could hear a distant fire somewhere else on the ship, but all her mind could think about was getting as far away from her lover's corpse as she could.
As the door slid open, something collapsed in the doorway. It could barely be recognised as having once been a living thing. Metallic bones were bent and partially eaten by something with sharp teeth. She had seen the skulls of Replikas before—even those belonging to LSTR units—but never Elster's. It was too monstrous, too chaotic.
"I'm sorry, Elster," tears of shame and horror burned the surface of her face. "I'm really sorry."
She stepped over the other corpse belonging to her partner and ran down the corridor, ignoring the others that have been abandoned and forgotten, and barricaded herself in her personal quarters. There was still the rupture in the hull freezing her to the bone, but the rubble had been cleaned away. Her TV was in the corner with the tapes stacked neatly at the side. Her treadmill was gathering dust and snow out of sight. At the foot of her bed, another corpse sat in waiting.
But unlike the others, that Elster was not decayed or wounded by any external force. As she cautiously approached, she saw the faintest sign of colour still to her cheeks.
Ariane fell to her knees in front of her. Her hand rested against her lover's cheek. She was still warm, but death had still come for her. That Elster just had a more recent, peaceful death.
She dragged herself into Elster's lap and pulled limp arms around her waist in a cruel reenactment of their earlier, better days. Above them, she could see a red sky with snowflakes dancing in the air to celebrate their bitter reunion.
"Why did it have to be us?" she traced her cold fingers along Elster's parted lips. "Why did it have to be you?"
Ariane lifted her head up and swallowed down her guilt as she pressed her lips against the dead woman's. It had been too long since she last felt another's warm affection. The night she passed, Ariane had kissed Elster's feverish forehead goodnight before never speaking to her again. Her fingers tangled themselves in her black hair as she tasted the decay within her mouth. There was a foolish, childish hope that if she held on to her just a little bit longer, the arms around her waist would tighten with life, and she would not be alone anymore.
But as she ran out of breath and parted ways, she was left with only bitter shame for ever thinking that the two of them could have a peaceful ending.
Her head collapsed on to her partner's chest, and she gave up trying to listen for a heartbeat.
"Elster, please," the snow descended upon their bodies, blanketing them in the bitter cold, "Return to me."