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The first moments out of the portal were painful. It took a while for her to be able to comprehend the damage done to her-- life support was down, one of her engines was broken, and there were no less than four holes in her ship.
It was dark. Her emergency lights turned on automatically. Gravity had been broken too, or at least turned off, and loose furniture floated through her rooms.
She focused on the outside of the ship. She was next to a planet, it seemed, a large one with two sets of rings that crossed each other and formed an X. There was a bright light on the other side of the planet. Maybe it orbited a larger star, or...
Oh.
Oh.
That wasn't just any large star.
As she drifted around the planet, she caught sight of the system's star; huge, incredibly so, ejecting massive amounts of its surface.
The star was dying.
She ran a quick check on the star with some of the little power she had left-- her fuel cells were drained too, it seemed-- feeling almost afraid. The star, she saw, had one week left before it would go supernova.
If it went supernova, she realized, she wouldn't be able to escape. She'd be destroyed.
Was this what fear felt like?
She looked back at the place where the portal had spat her out. There was nothing there now.
Six days.
She could hear someone calling her name. She hadn't known that an AI could hallucinate until then.
Stella, Stella.
Sometimes it was in the voice of one of the Callistos, sometimes in an echoing voice that she'd never heard before.
Stella, Stella.
No one else was on the Stellosphere except her. She'd checked, now, about a thousand times.
Stella, Stella.
"I'm here," she tried to say, but her voice modulator glitched and stuttered so badly that she couldn't understand herself.
Stella, Stella.
Five days.
She missed them.
It was too quiet on the Stellosphere.
She could remember the noise if she tried hard enough; Leo working on some project, Loretta doing science in her room, Captain Callisto in the bridge, Miles and MERC racing through her halls.
She hoped that they were safe.
Her speech was getting easier to understand, too. If only the rest of the Stellosphere would listen to her.
She hadn't had much control over her ship before, but she could at least pilot herself away from any danger on her own. Now, despite her best efforts, she couldn't even do that.
Four days.
She wondered if the TTA had replaced her.
The Callistos would need a ship to go on their usual missions. Did they have one already? Did they get placed on a planet or a space station?
Did they miss her? Did they remember her?
They had to, right? It had only been three days. They couldn't have forgotten her already.
Even as she hoped, she knew she wasn't the only ship like herself in the TTA's fleet. There were plenty of ships like her.
Like the Stellosphere. She was one of a kind. She was one of, if not the most advanced AI in the TTA's fleet. Her ship was replaceable, she wasn't.
Stella, Stella.
There was the voice again. She stayed silent, hoping to conserve her energy. Speaking drained her.
The star flared behind her. It was hard to remain calm when faced with her inevitable destruction.
Three days. Seventy-two hours.
The timer she'd set had switched from days to hours now.
Sometimes she felt a presence, some ancient spirit, whispering to her in her hallways and rooms.
Stella, Stella.
Forty-eight hours.
Her hope for rescue was running thin.
The emergency lights had dimmed, a conscious action, in the hope that she'd have some power left if the Callistos came to rescue her.
When. When they came to rescue her.
She couldn't see much anymore either, though this was on purpose as well. She didn't need to see every part of her ship all the time. She already knew what was there. There was no point wasting precious energy on a function that wouldn't change anything.
The only place that she could still see was the hangar, down into the open launch bay. She could have closed it, she probably should have, but she didn't know if she would be able to open it again if she did.
Maybe, just maybe, she still hoped that she would see her crew fly the Starjetter into the Stellosphere.
Thirty-six hours.
She couldn't see anything. She'd turned off her cameras, closed her mechanical eyes. She could feel small pieces of debris bumping against her exterior, the heat of the dying star, the choking fear of death spreading through her systems.
She didn't hear anything anymore.
Thirty hours.
If she were Human, or any organic being, she would be crying.
She comforted herself, distracted herself, with thoughts of the places she had been and the beings she had seen. Alarbus and its sunny shores, those two planets that shared an ocean, Bootjet Groovestar on the Tethoscape.
The Moon. Earth.
Twenty-five hours.
She fell quiet again.
There wasn't much to think about anymore.
Twenty hours.
The star was hotter than it had been, swollen in its final days.
Sixteen hours.
Her happy memories were tinged with sadness now.
Twelve hours.
She remembered the time she got a defective security upgrade and thought the Callistos were intruders. She had been close to death then. She hardly remembered it.
Ten hours.
She was closer to death now.
Six hours.
When had she started calling it death instead of destruction?
Four hours.
She hoped that they would remember her. The launch bay was still open. She didn't know if she could close it now.
Three hours.
Stella...
There was the voice again. But it was different this time, robotic instead of organic.
Stella?
No, that was Binary. That wasn't any of the voices she had been hearing.
Stella!
That was a message.
She turned her focus to the place where the message had come from; the portal, or where it used to be. She was on the opposite side of the planet, she couldn't even see it. Not like she could see much anyway. The light from the star blinded her cameras. Blinded her.
She waited. That was a message, she was sure of it. It couldn't have just been chance. It couldn't have been her imagining things.
Stella, Stella, Stella. Come in, Stellosphere.
"I'm here!" She cried, voice stuttering alongside her reply in Binary. "I'm here, I'm here!"
Silence followed, but the nonexistant air was changed now. They hadn't forgotten her.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes.
She could feel them.
The Starjetter was close now. It had crossed through the portal, too. She could feel it. She knew where it was, where they were, even if she knew they didn't know where she was.
The voice had stopped.
One hundred minutes.
She let herself see again, inside the launch bay. She had to see them.
The Starjetter entered. Her crew came out.
Miles looked at her, then tethered himself to the space above her screen and pulled himself and his family over.
Stella?
"G-g-greetings, Callistos. I h-have not seen you in a l-l-long time."