[Estimated reading time: 119 minutes]

[This work is a first/rough draft, comments welcome.]

[Content Warning: This story contains the death of a loved one, discussions of suicide, and apocalyptic descriptions.]

Gant, the youngest settlement on Misa

Gant was a twenty-mile long dome village, that sat over the river Shane.
The river entered and exited the city by way of two great dams, the East and West gates, respectively.
Humans founded Gant just two decades back, and just a century after the first people set foot on the alien world of Misa.
Gant's humongous dome consisted of millions of clear and nearly-indestructible triangles, about two meters long on each side, and smelted nearby out of the abundant sand.
House-sized robots littered the ever-shifting perimeter of the dome, and extended it with the steady stream of prefabbed panels that came in on huge freight drones from the desert.

The Gant dome was one of a dozen that humans had started on the planet, the most recent one, and already the fourth biggest habitat by population.
Amel to the east was a larger and older settlement, back from the early days of the humans' arrival on the planet, but it was three days flight away, a hefty investment.

The Wick Canyon that ran in this region, between the two domed settlements, formed the Eye: a short loop of Canyon stuck out into the plateau like a hitchhikers thumb, and in the center was a circle of mountain peaks, with a dark deep depression in the middle forming the pupil.

Jen and Oz, and company

Jenny "Jen" Hikari and Osmond "Oz" Fielding have lived in Gant for the past twelve years.
Jen came to Gant from Earth: she showed up on a shuttle with two dozen other volunteers and dove into the life of terraforming a new planet, one domed region at a time, by running industrial and civilian construction projects.
Jen signed up fully knowing that her work is but a pebble, the first of its kind, but very early in the process, and something that would eventually be replaced with fulltime structures carved out of marble and granite, the permanent markers of their civilization.
She had no illusions about seeing a terraformed Misa before she passed away, so she was just here to improve things for the next few pebbles.

Oz came to the city from the older settlement of Amel, to the east, where he was born and grew up.
Now he spent his days improving the recycling systems of Gant, like he did back home, a decade back.

Jen and Oz bumped into each other at The Bar, back when there was just one of those in the whole place, and instantly found in each other a kindred spirit.
They sat there, talking about everything under the stars, and drank the place closed, then came back after work every day after that.
That was the start and most of the extent of their relationship, something that worked for both.
Nothing romantic passed between them - Jen preferred women, Oz was too busy to bother with a relationship - but in each other they found a friend and a confidant, and they talked about everything that was on their minds.

Oz took Jen on a tour of Amel, a few years back, and showed her where he had grown up.
Introduced her to respected bio-engineers and judges with whom he'd run in gangs as a kid.
They camped in the Wick Canyon a few times a year, and once they spent a long break aboard the Misa Orbital Science Station, or MOSS as it was frequently referred to.
Oz wasn't crazy about the zero-gee sections, but enjoyed the spacer foods and their innovative uses of Paste in such varied combinations of flavor and texture.
They tried Paste steak, potatoes, crepes, fowl, turnovers, salads, pancakes, sushi, and even bananas flambe, a real treat in zero-gee.

On that trip to orbit, Jen met Helene, a recent arrival from Mars who was studying robotics at the MOSS zero-gee tech lab.
Helene's assignment was only for six months, after which she would have had to go home, but after meeting Jen she quickly made her stay permanent.
Helene sent a virtual postcard to her friends and family back on Mars: it consisted of two women, with Jen and Helene's faces, loading up a vintage U-Haul.

Three years later

That trip was three years ago.
Jen's work routinely took her to different regions of the village, so she was often flitting around the dome in her Red Junior jumper, while talking with Helene on the private voice chat.

Helene was still in zero-gee robotics research, and was having a lot of luck getting the drones to spin complex structures out of plentiful iron.
She also managed to schedule her shifts in a way that every day she talked with Jen for almost six hours.
And Helene spent every weekend down on the ground, rode a shuttle up and down, and treated it as a sort of commute.
Sometimes she needed to continue her work aboard the shuttle, and on those occasions she only managed to send Jen a few short messages about the trip: "leaving work", "got a seat by the window", "working, see you soon!".
Today was such a day, and so Jen was more nervous than usual.

Jen and Oz were at the Pilot's Lounge, an arcade and bar on the edge of the colony, right across the way from the spaceport.
Jen kept on glancing at the screen behind Oz, kept looking for the arrival information of a particular shuttle.
Oz pushed a pint of beer toward Jen.

"Ha, keep your pants on!" Oz said as he appraised Jen's anxious demeanor.
"She'll be here soon!"

Jen took a hearty swig and nodded agreement.

"How's that project going, at the East Gate?" Jen asked Oz.

Oz raised an eyebrow: "Ha, been done with that for two months now!
We had that amazing celebration, at the christening ceremony, remember?"

"Well, shit, yeah," Jen shrugged awkwardly, took a big slow drink of her beer, sat there quietly, as if she'd forgotten her question.

"Hey, how are you and Helene doing?" Oz tried a different approach.

"We're... we're having a hard time," Jen shook her head sadly.
"I don't know if we're going to make it, you know.
She's been so damn distant recently, it feels like she's not always present, even when we're together.
I wonder if, if maybe she's met someone up on the Station.
Well, shit."

Jen looked up into the bright sky over the spaceport.
"Think I see the shuttle!" she said, not taking her eyes off some distant point above them.

Oz looked up and was momentarily blinded by the sun.
He flipped a pair of dark goggles over his eyes, which monitored his pupils and matched the brightness of the light to what Oz could handle at that moment.
He stared up past the not-too-bright blob of the sun toward the twinkle of the descent thrusters at the business end of Helene's shuttle.

Oz squinted his eyes and the goggles adjusted the focal lengths of the twin lenses, kicked in the image stabilization, and after a moment Oz was able to read the shuttle's registration number, the large text printed on the ship's active thrusters.

As Oz watched, the shuttle's powerful thruster stammered, its bright blue torch sputtered into a yellow flame, then entirely went out.
Then the shuttle exploded.

4 days later

Jen stalked around the apartment, in a determined rush, moved her belongings around in a mad rush to clean up the place one last time.
Oz watched from the doorway and drank his coffee, in between bites of a pastry.
Jen had allowed him to come along with her, even as far as the Eye, on the condition that he stays out of her way.
So Oz was having his morning intake of caffeine and glucose, and concentrated on remembering Jen and Helene in a happy light.

"Here," Jen said and extended a chip to Oz, "I made you a mix tape, for the flight."
She smiled, sadly, as was her style now, and headed out of her place.
Jen was dressed in her favorite green camping gear and carried a used and faded red backpack.
Oz shut the door behind them and hurried to the launch pad.

To get to the pad, they needed to exit through the East Gate.
It was busy today, the gate was teeming with a rare sight: a crowd!
As Jen made her way out of Gant, she was hugged and kissed by friends, family, even near-total strangers.

Jen had a particular approach to grief, and one of those was this, a quick but public departure.
Oz followed closely behind and thanked as many the well-wishers as possible on their way out.

At the spaceport, two jumpers were waiting for them: Jen took her Red Baron, and Oz climbed aboard his Green Machine.
Oz sealed his jumper, then plugged in the chip that Jen gave him.
The onboard computer showed a playlist, and Oz started it, turned the volume up.
Classic rock flowed through the jumper and Oz imagined Jen listening to the same music in her jumper.

"Thanks for this mix, Jen," Oz broadcast to Jen on their private text channel.

Oz looked outside, toward Jen's Green Machine, and saw Jen's head bob in tune to the same music he was listening to.

The jumpers sat on a platform, which now moved toward the edge of the dome, where a large circular hole was cut out of the clear material, and replaced with a pitch-black door.
The jumpers were now in an airlock, and the door closed behind them.
The spaceport's spherical external airlock irised open to the quiet atmosphere of Misa.

The jumpers took off and headed south east, south of the coming sun, towards the Eye section of the Wick Canyon.

Wick Canyon, The Eye

A long time ago, millions of years before humans set eyes and then feet on the small and dry planet called Misa, the conscious entities that lived on Misa had decided to build a great mega-structure.
So they spent eons on the task and ended up creating the Wick Canyon.

Take a rocky planet like Mars, find a big enough plate of stone, and carve a winding canyon into it.
The canyon was two miles deep, between sixteen and eighteen miles wide, and some ten thousand miles long.
Oh, and it was a loop.
After you got done traversing its serpentine and winding curves, you'd end up exactly where you started.

The floor of the Wick Canyon was covered in a thick layer of fertile soil, in some places it was kilometers of soil piled up in the cut-out stone.
The rivers on the plateau fell into the Canyon, and mixed together to create the Great Circular River of Wick Canyon.
And out of this fertile and well-watered soil sprouted the great needle-covered pine trees of ancient Misa.
These trees grew very tall, and quickly, which was great, because the Wick Canyon was always on fire.

The forest fire traveled at a leisurely pace of one mile per hour, much slower than a walking human, and it took the fire a whole Misa year to travel around the Wick Canyon.
Every year, there was a fire in the same section of the canyon.
Then the trees came back, just as tall and as big as before.
The trees were very good at absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere and the soil, and giving it up once a year as they were destroyed by the rages of fire.

The Front was the name of the currently-burning section of the forest.
Distances in this part of Misa came in two flavors: the time it took a jumper to fly there, and how long it took the Front to get here.
When Jen set out in her jumper, four days after the disastrous death of Helene, she set her ultimate sights on a particular section of the Wick Canyon that was about a day's flight from her home in Gant, and one that would see the Front in about two months.

Jen and Oz flew for a while and separately listened to the mix that Jen had picked out.
Oz cried, and was immensely thankful for the auto-pilot.

After two hours in the air, Jen reached out and spoke on a private voice channel.

"Thank you for coming with me, Oz.
This-
Well, shit, this really means a lot."

"Ha, of course," Oz replied.

After a minute, Jen came back and talked about camping in the Wick Canyon with Helene a few years ago, then coming back a few times to the same site.
She had fond memories of quiet walks, climbing the young but already-sturdy trees bare-handed, and playing in the river.
Of stalking deer, then spooking them and watching them run, always "upwick", always away from the Front.

("Upwick" was the direction that the Front traveled, and the direction that the humans typically followed, when they bothered to brave the twists and turns of the Canyon, instead of just flying around in a shuttle or a jumper.
Jen had a mnemonic: "upwick" was away from the fire, which was a good thing; "downwick" was toward the fire, which was a bad thing.
Up good, down bad.)

Jen talked about how Helene found their perfect campsite, and how it was going to feel coming back to it after all this time, until she trailed off and silence descended yet again.

"We're headed to that campsite you shared?", Oz asked.

"No, we're not.
We're going to a different camping spot, in the Eye.
We'll camp at the Eye tonight, together, and then we'll split up in the morning," Jen replied.

Split up, and you head to the campsite, a place I won't know about, someplace to wait and die, thought Oz.
He'd decided against hiding a tracking device on Jen's shuttle or in her supplies, and regretted the decision every moment since.
But there was nothing to do, she'd filed all the right forms with the Board, and in a little while she was going off the grid.
As her oldest friend, Oz felt like he had no choice in the matter, and felt somehow robbed by that fact.

They flew at a high altitude, the thin rivers fading away into nothingness, unbecoming.
But the Wick Canyon was a big fat stroke of dark green paint against the sun-blasted desert.
It made a loop, a U shape that formed the somewhat rounded Eye, and they were aiming for a spot in the far crook.

They approached the bend and began to lower their altitude, aiming down, toward the desert plateau that spread out in every direction.
They fell toward the sun-blasted desert, but missed it and entered a two-mile free-fall over a dense, green forest.
A layer of mist covered the floor of the canyon, and Jen aimed her jumper into the murky depths.

Jen couldn't remember if she had been back here this year, over the past eleven and a half months that this spot had been growing and developing.
She wished that she did visit, because that's how she wanted to remember this time, as a re-visit to an earlier, happier memory.

The autopilot carefully brought down both jumpers into a clearing by the river, a spot that sang out a welcome.

Jen pretended that she was here, camping, one last time with Helene, and dug into her special stash, fetched a bottle of Europan whisky that was made from some sub-ice seaweed.

Overnight at the Eye campsite, Friday, 15 Days to Front

The meadow was 15 days from the Front, which meant that the eternal fire would devour the meadow in 15 days.
The meadow and anyone who remained here.

In the morning, Oz was going to fly back to the domed safety of Gant, and Jen planned to keep flying, toward a different camp spot.
A 2 month spot.
But that was tomorrow's plan, not tonight's reality.

As the sun began to dip toward the horizon, Jen and Oz chopped down a few trees for fuel, setup an old-fashioned fire, and tossed skewers of real deer meat over the flame.
It was a celebration, after all.

Jen pulled out the Europan whisky and poured like the world was ending.
She looked up into the sky and noted a dark column on the horizon.

"Well, shit, the Twilit Forest is starting to burn," she observed.
"We went there last year, it was glorious," Jen remembered and held up tumbler of whisky in a silent toast.
Oz clinked his glass and they drank and made faces at the strange concoction.

"Helene had never tried hallucinogenics," Jen continued, "and I had some shitty experiences from college, so we went to write new experiences, better ones, happier, and we did it together."
Jen recalled the mad two-day trip to the Twilit Forest, a permanently-shadowed section of the Wick Canyon where time stopped making sense.
Alcohol played an important part of that vacation, but so did the plants in the Twilit Forest.

Those plants were coated in hallucinogenics and sprayed the stuff over everything, so it was impossible not to trip balls while in the Twilit Forest.

The campfire got going and the two exchanged non-customary fireside stories.
Oz opened up about Helene, remembered their last moments together, cried, bawled at the her incandescent memory.
Jen thanked him, joined in recalling her favorite times, her deepest, darkest memories.
She even brought up the times that she had doubts, about herself and Helene, about whether they would have a future.

She had doubts, but everyone had doubts.

The kebabs smelled ready and Oz got them down, handed one skewer to Jen and kept one for himself, then put the rest on a plate.
They snacked on kebabs and downed shots of whisky as the night deepened and the forest began to sing.

Once the sun went down, the strange thermodynamic properties of the clearly-unnatural Wick Canyon brought a strong wind that blew upwick from the Front.
As the wind sped past the twists and turns of the Canyon, the gale was modulated and shifted into a consistent wail, a geologic singing the song of its people.

The forest spoke, the fire burned, and Oz reclined in his chair to stare up at the familiar-to-him constellations.
Oz started calling off the Misa-specific constellations and pointing them out with the help of the fire-smoke and a small laser, and Jen nodded along, traced the paths of the ones she could remember.
Jen and Helene loved hearing about the local constellations, the ones they hadn't grown up with.
No Ursas here, Minor or Major; no Orion's Belt; the patterns familiar to most humans (the estimated trillion humans who have ever lived on Earth) are nowhere to be found in this sky.

"Are you coming back?" Oz asked during a moment of silence.

"Well, shit, it's really not up to me, I don't really have a lot of say in the process," Jen replied.
"I go out there, and weep and mourn Helene, and at some point I'm supposed to... what?
Move on?
Fuck that!
That's obviously not going to happen, not in two months, never-mind two years!
I don't want to live in a world that doesn't have Helene.
Hopefully I'll change my mind in the next two months, you know?"

"Ha.
Here's to the hope, then," Oz said as he popped the caps on two Imperial beers, offered Jen one.
They toasted and drank deeply, as was required by the writing on the bottles.

Departing Eye, going their own ways, Jen arrives in Heaven, Saturday, 14 Days to Front

In the morning they packed up tent, checked over their shuttles, and hugged good-bye.

Oz stood there and tried to find something to say, but came up empty.
Jen nodded, agreeing, and they went their separate ways.

Oz flew back towards Gant, and Jen continued onward, out of the Eye and into the next section of the Wick Canyon.

This flight would take her most of the day, so they left early in the morning, just as the sun was striking the tall crags of Uriah's Peak, a mountain range to the west.

Jen set the auto-pilot and turned her chair away from the console, to face the back of the shuttle.
Jen thought of the shuttle as having a front (the position she was sitting when flying the shuttle) and a back (everywhere else), so now she faced the packed shelves, the rifle on its mount, a couch that turned into a bed and took up half the space, and between the bed and the wall there was the narrow walkway that lead to the airlock.

Jen moved to the bed and put on a "Talking Heads" album, one that Helene introduced her to on their second date.
The album was an experimental and somewhat strange performance that nonetheless resonated intensely for Jen, thrilling her to her very core.
She now listened to it and remembered the last time she and Helene had listened to it together.
A month ago, when they'd finally convinced Oz to give it a try, and the three of them watched the 1984 concert.

Jen sent Oz a message, reminded him of the album.
Oz started playing the same, again, of course.

"Long travel times and auto-pilot are the perfect way to catch up on classical music," Oz messaged Jen.
She laughed out loud, for the first time since Helene's death, at the absurdity of the statement, and maybe the absurdity of her own situation, her own mood.

"That's what Helene used to say, too.
Thanks," Jen messaged him back.

She touched a tattoo on her wrist and turned on focus mode.
Osmond's messages would have to wait, for a while.

At least until the end of this album, Jen thought.

The song "Heaven" started to play, and Jen lost her composure, cried in earnest over the memories of Helene, their lost time together.
The music eventually cut through the tears and Jen lay in bed and listened to the album.
She touched a different tattoo on her arm, and the auto-doc injected Jen with a mild sedative, and she slept peacefully for eight hours, after which the auto-pilot woke her up and notified her of the upcoming arrival.
They had finally arrived at the 2 month spot that Jen had just started to think of as Heaven.

The first night in Heaven, it was too late to setup proper camp, so Jen slept in the shuttle.

First morning in Heaven, Sunday, 59 Days to Front

Jen opened her eyes and took in the strange scene.
Her shuttle was illuminated in shades of blue, the control board lit up in green hues, the sky outside was red, and all together it seemed strange and alien.
The morning light was hitting a distant spot of polished blue titanium, and its reflection shone down onto Jen's shuttle.
The red tint came off the rock wall on the opposite side, a feature Jen forgot about for a moment.

Jen used the small bathroom to expel and shower, then put on clean clothes, clipped her favorite knife to her belt, put on the emergency mask (in case she ended up in an unbreathable environment, though the mask was typically unused), and stepped into the airlock.
The airlock cycled and Jen breathed in the familiar smell of the Wick Canyon forest.
It was peaty, it was mossy, it was incredibly humid.
Some labeled this part of the Canyon as the PNW of Misa, and that comment typically took the conversations off track.

Most of the planet was a sand-blasted hell-scape with a thin atmosphere over it, hence the necessity for the domes, Gant and Amel among them.
But here, down in the depths of the Wick Canyon, the atmosphere was thick and luxurious, and life was possible.

Jen walked out onto a large beach that transformed into a meadow, a bit of open space that followed the water.
These short open spaces were a rarity, which is why Jen and Helene camped here before.
Jen looked around the beach and found the tell-tale clues to their previous stay.

"Let's put the camp here," she said to herself and started to set things up, just like their camp was the last time she stayed here with Helene.

The food processor she put close to the water, ran a short hose into the river, and a pair of long thick wires to camp.
Jen opened the processor, checked on the mycelium culture, sealed it up again when everything looked good.
When the processor was plugged in, it made a loud whirring noise and gobbled up the watts from the shuttle, and in turn produced a thin tan-colored paste that was carried to camp over a long thick cable.
At camp, the steady stream of soft Paste was dumped into a cooking pot, and Jen reached in for a handful every now and then.
The uncooked stuff was fine to eat as it was, so Jen resorted to this well-known "graduate-student diet" during her setup time on the first day.

Jen put out the table, the benches, arranged it all around the fire-pit, then chopped up enough firewood for at least three nights.
The woods around the campsite were on the younger side, thinner saplings that didn't work out in some way.
Their still-forming branches were perfect for fires, since they still held concentrated sap, having failed to send it to its extremities.
Jen preferred this younger type of wood to start with, and typically transitioned to the slower burn of the older, larger trees, from deeper inside the forest.

After she finished setting up camp, Jen cooked: she rolled and folded the paste into an imitation of meat, so that the re-folded and pre-seasoned paste formed the chewy "muscle tissue".
She folded the paste over and over as a French chef might fold the layers of a croissant.
She sprinkled on some extra vitamins and a bit of hot pepper, then roasted the kebabs over an open fire.
The moons of Misa came out over the western mountain range, the name of which Jen had forgotten, again.
Jen blinked and the range was highlighted in neon-green and bore its official name: Uriah's Peak.

"Helene introduced me to them, too", Jen texted and sent an invite to Osmond.
Then she turned on her "Uriah favorites" playlist and piped it through the shuttle speakers.
Oz heard her and the music through the microphone.

"Thanks for this," Oz said.

They listened to Uriah Heep and told each other stories, and for a while each one felt as if they were sitting together, staring up at the same sky, telling stories and watching the same fires.

The album ended and Jen headed for her tent.
"Glad you were here to listen to that, Oz," she called out and wrapped herself up in a sleeping bag.

"Good night, Jen," Oz said and terminated the connection.

First week in Heaven, Monday-Saturday, 58-53 Days

The first week Jen spent hiking in the wilderness around the campsite, reaching farther and farther each day, finding out the curves and pitfalls of the landscape where she would lead the rest of her life.
She used a parchment at camp and illustrated it with the map of the area, added the heights and depths as she saw them.

Jen wasn't certain that she wanted to leave this spot.
She missed Helene every waking moment, and a very sizeable fraction of her soul wanted very much to not exist.
Certainly, that part didn't want to exist in a world where Helene no longer lived, breathed, loved.

How could I ever move on?, Jen asked herself and didn't have a ready answer.

Each day, Jen hiked for hours, reaching farther and farther away from the campsite, but always returning before nightfall.

That's how the first week progressed.
Jen hiked, cooked, listened to old favorites, and cried.

"It's not fucking fair!" she screamed and cursed fate.
"Who dies from a fucking meteor these days?!"

Evening reflection, constellations of Earth and Misa, intruders, Saturday, 53 Days

Jen finished her dinner, tossed more logs on the fire, put on a loud, violent album, and called Oz.
"Helene kept asking me to move in with her, to stay at MOSS," she said.
"If we lived on the Station, she wouldn't have died like that.
I could have commuted to Gant, just as she did.
I could get used to fucking in zero-gee."

"Your work, your life, they're in Gant.
This city is your baby, and you've put so much of yourself into it, you couldn't just leave it," came Oz's reply.
"They've also got half-gee berths specifically for sex."

"Thanks for that freaking imagery.
Still, Helene's work was always up on the damn Station, and mine is always with Gant.
Maybe we were too different to be together."

"No, Jen!
That's not true at all!
What happened was a one-in-a-billion fluke, a cosmic fuck-up, and it had nothing at all to do with you and Helene.
And that's the worst part, that the universe just blindly decided who was going to die that day, and Helene's name came up."

Jen looked up at the night sky through tear-filled eyes.
She drank her whisky and thought of Helene, of similar nights of sitting under the cloudless sky and watching the stars.

"Oz, tell me about the constellations," Jen said and made herself comfortable in the adirondack.
She switched the loud, violent album to some chill reggae, turned up the volume so that Oz could hear the music as well.

Oz talked about the stars, pointed out the ones that were visible, told the stories that his parents told him about the constellations.
Jen listened and drank whisky and remembered the Earth myths she'd heard herself.
For a while they alternated and told each other the myths about Callisto, Orion, Shawshank, Forte, Pleiades.

About an hour into the astronomy seminar, Jen heard a trio of sonic booms go crack crack crack.
She looked up and noticed the tell-tale lights of three high-speed drones as they flew over the Wick Canyon.
A deep roaring rumble followed, then echoes as the sound bounced off the tall cliffs of the Canyon.
The air vibrated a few seconds longer, then the interlopers were gone.
The sonic booms interrupted Oz in the middle of his retelling of the Tannhäuser myth, but he continued after a moment.

Kayaking and the appearance of the stranger, a chat, a radio message, privacy, Sunday, 52 Days

To kick off the second week of Jen's trip, she assembled a kayak and paddle, and went against the river toward the Front for about four hours, then enjoyed a relaxing drift down the river, upwick, back to her campsite.
Jen took her time on the trip, took her craft from bank to bank, investigated the vegetation along the shore and even some of the wildlife.
She saw fishes of course, a handful of turtles who got spooked by her kayak, and lots of birds that inhabited the forest around these parts.
She navigated the kayak around a bend and was surprised at how close she was to her campsite.

There was also something off about the site, something that immediately jumped out at Jen.
Someone was by the campfire, which was burning at a good pace, must have been burning for a while now.
Jen wondered, momentarily, how she had missed the smoke in the sky, but then her attention came back to her guest.

The someone had their back to Jen, and the kayak was almost at the opposite bank of the river, so Jen was unable to see any determining features, but it looked like a large obsidian-black person.
Jen gunned the external motor on the kayak, pushed at full blast for the first time on this trip, and was at camp quickly, but by that time the stranger was already gone.

Jen contacted Oz, told him the strange story.

"Did you try to get them on the radio?" Oz asked.

"Well, shit, hadn't thought of that yet, hold on," Jen replied, then brought up the radio interface.

Jen sent a local broadcast: "This is Jen Hikari in the Canyon, at around 52 Days, near a river bend.
I just spotted someone in my camp.
Who ever's out there, please identify.
Over."

Jen waited a few minutes and took the opportunity to fetch a cold beer.

"I sent a message, but hell, they might not have their radio on," Jen texted Oz.
Every person on Misa outside of a domed village was supposed to carry an emergency radio with them, but this wasn't exactly possible to always enforce.

The Misa Governance Board created the law of the "land outside established villages", and they highly valued privacy and freedom.
They even made some very specific provisions for individuals going off the grid, just as Jen was doing now.
But this also meant that you never knew who might be around the bend.

Jen kept an eye on the radio interface, but it remained silent: no one was responding to her call.

The stranger regularly comes back, Jen shoots some shit, Monday-Thursday, 51-48 Days

The next three times that Jen came back to the campsite after a hike, she saw the stranger, and every time they were gone by the time Jen reached the camp.
No one ever responded on the radio.

Oz suggested making an appeal to the Board, but Jen wanted to delay that option.
So the fourth day, she stayed in camp, re-read one of her favorite classics, listened to a few "KMFDM" albums, and drank Europan whisky, followed up by sherry from a Lunar winery.
She even took a few short dips in the river, as the sun peaked over the campsite.

The stranger never showed up.

"Someone is watching you," Oz hypothesized over chat.

No shit, Jen thought and nodded, but waited to reply.
Of course she knew this.
But what did it matter?

They never approached her, have even gone to great lengths to stay away from her.
Does it matter that they come by once a day, set up a fire, and leave?

Jen wondered this for a while, then realized that it had been a whole day since she cried about Helene.
The stranger was just distracting enough.

But Jen instantly became sad, depressed.
She didn't want to stop thinking of Helene.
She wanted to always keep Helene in her mind, in her heart, in her soul.

Jen grabbed her rifle from the the Red Baron, fished out a handful of clays out of a storage bay, and went shooting.

The clays were orange discs, designed and painted to look like old-fashioned clay pigeons, but in reality they were bullet-proof drones.
Jen tossed them down on the beach, walked away, then called out "Practice mode!", and the discs jumped into a single pile.

Jen raised the gun to her shoulder and yelled out "Pull", and instantly the topmost clay sprung into the air and flew in a parabola over the river.
Jen tracked it with her rifle, then squeezed the trigger and the disc fell out of the sky.

"Pull!" and the next disc flew up, even before the first one struck the ground.
As soon as the first disc hit the beach, it picked itself up and flew over in a low path over the water, back to the the rest of the clays.

The rifle rang out time and again, and its blast echoed back from the canyon walls.
Jen screamed in anger.

An awkward chat with the Board, security deployment, Friday, 47 Days

Antonio was the first to answer Jen's call to the Board.

"I'm camping in the Wick Canyon, at 47 Days, and there's someone who comes into my camp every freaking day.
Not feeling too safe, Antonio, I'm sure you can understand."

"Right you are, ma'am, that doesn't sound great.
OK, let's start this as a civil request, I'll just need your exact location..."
Antonio trailed off as he dug into Jen's file and saw the restricted access on her location.
When he came back, his tone made it clear that he knew who Jen was, probably from the news, and why access to her location was restricted.
"Ma'am, I'll need to get my supervisor, please hold a moment."

Jen nodded to herself but did not reply.
After a short wait, a woman's voice came on the radio.

"Morning, this is Talia, Board Officer in Charge.
Sorry about the wait, ma'am, but there's a lock in place, so we need a quick override here.
It'll just be a moment."

Jen waited quietly.
She didn't want to deal with bureaucratic bullshit on a normal day, never mind when she was alone in the Canyon and being stalked by weirdos.

"OK, ma'am, we have records of no other visitors in your area.
There is a group of fishers about a week downwick, at 40 days, ahem, plus or minus.
And three couples camping three days upwick, plus or minus.
We're not seeing anyone closer to your current location."

The supervisor had the annoying habit of emphasizing the bits of information related to the great big elephant in the room: "you're off the grid, ma'am, so we're not allowed to know exactly where the hell you are!".

"Damn, thanks," Jen replied, slowly, sadly.
"Say, Talia, can you put an alarm on my locations, so I know if someone comes within 1 day of here?"

"Of course, ma'am, it's in place now," and as Talia said this, Jen's attention was caught by a notification about the alarm.
The Governance Board setup an alarm in case they detected a registered ship or radio in the area, or happened to notice an unregistered vehicle.

Jen also deployed half a dozen drones to watch over the campsite, and they hovered at various heights all around her, moved in a randomized program that worked to keep an eye on ten acres of land surrounding the camp.
The drones took a few minutes to make the initial scans, and eventually the tattoos on her arm glowed green to indicate a safe perimeter.

Hanging in camp, a long swim, and a visitor, Saturday, 46 Days

The next day Jen decided to spend in camp, once again reading, listening to music, getting properly fucked up on alcohol.
She started her day with a skinny-dip in the river, then stayed unclothed the rest of the morning.
She prepared and cooked Paste as another set of kebabs over an open fire, for which she donned a "Kiss The Chef" apron, the only time she wore any clothing at all.
This was Helene's favorite meal, from her childhood camping trips on Mars, so Jen frequently cooked it up, on these camping trips, at home, and even in the zero-gee of the Station.
The dripping and smoldering kebabs were usually a cure-all for whatever was troubling Helene.

"Small bits of vegipork throughout the day, that's what they say," Jen muttered to herself as she bit into the faux flesh.

After breakfast Jen read for a while, then went for another dip in the river.
The Canyon was warm this time of year, and the river was a very comfortable temperature, unlike the mountain-fed freezing rivers of Jen's childhood camping on Earth.

Jen and Helene loved comparing their camping experiences, from their childhoods on Earth and Mars, to the Wick Canyon, all of them so uniquely different.

Jen swam back to camp, climbed out of the river and dried herself off, before she noticed the stranger sitting on the bench, watching the fire.

The stranger was wearing grey hiking gear, a green backpack, and a dark-green mask that covered his entire head.
The stranger was facing Jen, was looking in her direction, but otherwise did not respond.

Jen looked him over and saw no obvious weapons.
She walked toward the campfire, had barely walked a few steps when she blinked, and the stranger was gone.

Jen looked around, sure that a person couldn't just disappear, certain that something simple was happening.
At first she thought that maybe the stranger fell down, was lying and twitching by the campfire.
But the spot around the bench was empty, there was no one there.

Jen finally noticed that she was still naked and put on some clothes.
Then she called up the drone footage.

The footage of the Stranger, Saturday, 46 days

The screen showed a top-down view of the campsite.
After a moment Jen saw that the action was paused.
She moved a control and the camera dipped down, flew toward the campfire, then leveled out, and showed a still image of the fire.

Jen touched a control and the fire began to move, red tentacles reaching into the sky.

And suddenly, just like that, the stranger was standing by the fire, looking in Jen's direction.
The stranger wore a dark-brown mask, it looked as if it was carved from a single huge and ancient piece of bark.
The tree that gave up its form for the mask, it obviously did not exist in the Wick Canyon.

At least, not anymore.
The contiguous forest inside the Wick Canyon was, by definition, less than a year old.
The indigenous flora of the forest was being burned up every year, so there was no opportunity to develop such a thick and wide bark.

The mask was from the Outside, maybe even from a different planet.

Jen watched the surveillance, but the stranger just stood there, until Jen herself made an appearance.
And just as suddenly, the stranger was gone, disappeared into thin air in a performance that looked like bad editing from the ancient times.

Jen sent the clip with the stranger to Oz, with a summary of her experiences.

A hike, a zip-line, a conversation, Sunday, 45 Days

Jen slept in the Red Baron, with all the windows on mirror mode, and only woke up after she got eight hours of sleep.
Ship monitored Jen's state and administered drugs to wake her up, slowly, at the appropriate time.
Jen woke up awake and alert, determined to fight, to conquer the world.

"I can do this," she growled into the bathroom mirror.

Jen busied herself at the printer, and eventually got a rifle attachment out of the device.
The attachment held a spool of nano-chord, an indestructible length of fiber, which was attached to a carbon-fiber harpoon.

Jen left the campsite and headed up into the closest mountain range.
The curve in the river where Jen set camp, was a low-point in a narrow valley, a canyon-within-a-Canyon that offered amazing climbing opportunities.

She carried her rifle and the printed attachment, along with a pair of binoculars, and a pair of web-envelope rockets.
Armed for something bear-like.

Hours passed and Jen made her quiet way through the forest, up and down the varied valleys in this delta of rivers.
She stopped frequently and used her goggles to observe the campsite.
She stayed within view of the inactive fire and watched for any changes.

Eventually, Jen saw the stranger, inside the campsite, once again.
Her alarms hadn't gone off, for some reason, but Jen decided to look into that later.
She readied her rifle with its attachment, aimed at a spot over the campsite, and fired.

The carbon-fiber hook flew in a parabola and dragged the nano-chord behind it.
Then the hook impaled itself in a buried network of nano-chord webs that Jen had spread around the campsite.
The network detected the expected hook and constricted, held the anchor in place.
Jen planted the other end of the nano-chord into an overhanging rock, and dove down toward the campsite, holding onto the rifle, the nano-chord whipping through the attachment and slowing her fall.

Jen took twenty seconds to get down to the campsite, and then she was standing next to the fire, facing the stranger, once again.
Jen did not point the rifle at the stranger, but its barrel was pointing in the general direction of the intruder.

"Who the hell are you?" Jen asked.

The stranger stood motionless, and silent.

"Stop appearing in my campsite like this, I don't like it," Jen said, forcefully, bristling at the invasion.

After a moment, the stranger bobbed his head in a shallow nod.

That one motion, viewed close up, convinced Jen that this wasn't a human in front of her.
Whatever this stranger was, it wasn't a living member of the species Jen herself belonged to, Homo sapiens.
Jen felt a deep chill as she understood that she may be talking with a zombie, or a poor alien-infested bastard, or three "raccoons" stuffed into a hiker outfit.
She involuntarily took a step back, and the stranger was gone.

"Well, shit."

Message?, Sunday, 45 days

"Ha, maybe somebody wants to send you a message?" Oz offered, sounding almost sincere.

"Fucking email ain't good enough?!" Jen replied.
She put on a recent album of Io-thrash and got to work.

Jen looked into the footage and found the moment when the stranger moved his head in a bow.
It was so artificial, so inhuman, that Jen's deepest panic centers lit up and screamed.

The same panic came as Jen watched the video of the event.
She pushed a control-stick and the stranger became smaller, the view zoomed out and showed more of the surroundings.
Jen looked but failed to find any footsteps close to the stranger, any disturbances in the ground around him.

A few moments after the stranger appeared, the wooden logs in the inactive campfire proceeded to burst into flame as if ignited by the invisible breath of a dragon.

"Fuck, heat vision, that's damn scary," Jen muttered to herself.
She spent the night in the shuttle.

Oz takes a walk, finds a model, watches spiders, 45 days to death of Jen

It was Sunday evening and Oz left the recycling plant, was done with work for the next week.

It was the start of a three-day weekend for Oz, because of his particular project schedules, but he felt lost, didn't know what to do with all this free time.
In the past he would just go to the bar and shoot the shit with Jen, but of course she wasn't around.

On a whim, Oz decided to go for a walk through Gant, so he turned away from the train station and started walking on the dimly-glowing road.
The new recycling plant was located in the industrial section of the village, so for a while Oz walked through a jungle of twilit copper giants that moved loads on and off the freighter trucks, trains, flying drones, and even pipes.
The road glowed slightly and unobtrusively, so that Oz could see the stars in the glass-covered sky as well as the path in front of him.
Oz knew that the road was reacting to his own implants, which were radiating Oz's information into the environment.
The automated drones avoided him as easily as they avoided smacking into a tree or a building.

Then Oz crossed a boulevard and was in a residential neighborhood, and the sounds of heavy machinery were replaced with the riotous laughter of families enjoying life.

Oz walked without destination, without a plan, he walked just for the sake of walking.
He watched Gant in a way that he'd never done before, from the ground level and alone.
He was able to watch without comment, to absorb without being overwhelmed.

Oz walked through the Research Park, continued through to Lake Victoria, then followed its coast for a while until he found himself facing the Wick Canyon Model.

"Ha, I forgot you were here," Oz mumbled, addressing the plaza before him.

The Wick Canyon Model occupied the entire Gant University Plaza, an open quad space surrounded by Gant University buildings.
The plaza floor was made of local marble (a distinct red-on-white coloration that was very popular off-world) and panels of the same indestructible glass that was overhead.

Through the clear panels Oz saw the scale model replica of the Wick Canyon, this one cut out of red-on-white marble.
Small trees covered most of the Canyon, and the River (but more like a 'creek') flowed through it.
The Front was a bright-red region of the Canyon where pretend life was pretend-destroyed.
A hologram of black smoke rose from the glass where the Front was currently annihilating the Twilit Forest.

A friendly-looking man was standing a few feet away from the hologram.
A bright red light flashed into existence in front of the man's face, then faded, then flashed, then faded again.

Oz came over to the man and happily accepted the offered smoke.

"Ha, it's been a while...", Oz said, then puffed a few times and passed the smoke back to the man.

"Me pops introduced me to this stuff, called it 'jaz cigarettes' in his time, brought them with 'im on the freighter, was the first to plant sativa on the planet."

"Wow, that's impressive!", Oz nodded appreciatively.
"And, oh, I just have to say, I'm a huge fan of his work!"
Oz laughed and they passed the smoke around for a bit.

"Ha, nice to meet you, I'm Oz!"

"Son of Sam!"

"Ha!
Is that really your name, Son of Sam?"

"Sure is, just as McKenna means 'son of Cionaodh' in Gaelic, O'Connor is 'child of Conchobhar', Johnson is 'son of John', and so on.
My own name just fits into a different form of the same tradition, that's all," the man named Son of Sam replied.

Oz looked shocked, but nodded after a moment and conceded that this all made sense.

"Nice to meet you, Son of Sam!"
Oz was still wearing his work clothes, so he dug around in the various pockets of his jumper and brought out a pen-like device.
The man rose his eyebrows, then smiled, happy to see a fellow traveler.

Oz brought the device up to his lips and gently blew into it.
Out of the other side of the device, floated a dozen bubbles in various different sizes.
They floated through the plaza, through the holographic black smoke that rose from The Front, and popped eventually when they landed on or touched something real.

Oz offered the device to Son of Sam, who gladly accepted and proceeded to launch a few smoke-filled balloons into the night air.
The smoke inside of them flowed like a liquid, and spilled out in huge avalanches whenever the bubbles popped.

Son of Sam laughed, handed Oz the device, and went on his way, waving a goodbye to Oz.
"Hope you have a blessed night," Oz yelled, and Son of Sam was off on his newest adventure.

Oz stood and watched the Canyon for a while, followed a few of the maintenance spiders that crawled over the landscape and altered it as appropriate.
The spiders were thin and fast, so it was quite difficult to see them, especially now, in the evening.
Oz watched the area around The Front, which was lit up by the roaring fire and made it easier to notice the thin wiry beasts that moved miniature trees into the maw of the consuming monstrosity.

Oz thought of Jen facing the fire of The Front and the tears came, then and there, on the plaza.

A different visitor, Monday, 44 days

The day after the Stranger appeared, Jen once again stayed in camp and geeked out on music, alcohol, and every random Paste tapas recipe she could find.

At around noon, the overhead drone network alerted Jen to a visitor, a deer who was approaching the campsite from downwick, from the direction of the Front.

The deer was large and ancient, easily the oldest specimen that Jen had ever seen, with great coral-like antlers, a bright-red carapace that covered its chest, and the pitch-black scales that covered the rest of the animal.

"Oz is gonna freaking love this footage," Jen said to herself.

The Wick Canyon "deer" had no biological connection to that ancient human neighbor, but it was a term that the humans had adapted to this species of forest-dwelling animal.
The Wick Canyon deer were a bit smaller than the Earth variety, and instead of fur they had scales.
And, like all animals in the Wick Canyon, the deer laid eggs.

The gigantic specimen that stepped into camp must be a decade old at least, Jen figured.

She had seen deer racing through the forest a handful of times, but this was the first time she'd seen one so large, and so close, and moving so slowly.

The forest deer were like most animals in the Wick Canyon: nomads, always traveling upwick, away from the Front, traversing at an average speed of twenty-five miles a day, with some long stays once in a while.
Last time that Jen and Helene camped, they got drenched from head to toe by a huge, egg-carrying deer that ripped through the river next to them, on its way to some pleasant valley where she could nest and raise her babies for a few peaceful months.
Because of their incredible momentum and single-purpose demeanor during these times, the egg-carrying deer were some of the most dangerous creatures in the Wick Canyon.

The giant, ancient deer that stepped out of the forest was also holding a bright-blue plant in its mouth.
The deer walked up directly to the camping table and dropped the plant from its mouth and onto the map in progress, then cheerfully bounded out of the campsite, back in the same direction that he had just come from, back downwick toward the Front.

The mycena, Monday, 44 days

The bright-blue plant was a Mycena noctilucens, a breed of hallucinogenic mushrooms that was endemic to the Twilit Forest, and something that Jen and Helene had some of experience with.

"Oz, I think someone is trying to send me a message," Jen typed a quick text to Oz.
"A gigantic deer just dropped off a fucking mycena at my campsite."

"Mycena?
From the Twilit Forest?", came back Oz's incredulity at the situation.

"Yup, I know how that shit sounds, but it's true," came Jen's reply.

The Twilit Forest was a region in a shadowy section of the Wick Canyon, and this geographical anomaly was thought to be responsible for the Twilit Forest and its many hallucinogenic plants.
The Twilit Forest was also currently on fire, since that was the position of The Front.
So The Front was some 44 days away from Jen's campsite.

Did that deer just make a 44-day journey?
The Front moved at a leisurely pace of 25 miles a day, so 44 days was more than a thousand miles.

Did the deer start at the Twilit Forest?
Did it start on the far side of the forest?
Where else could it have gotten a Mycena noctilucens?

Jen quickly made a planter with the shuttle's printer and repotted the mycena, added some soil, then watered it.
Jen left the plant on the camping table, holding down one corner of the map she worked on, free to soak up the sun's rays and breathe in deep of the forest's air.
The plant should start to produce a mildly-hallucinogenic dew in less than a week.

The mycena grows, Monday-Thursday, 44-41 days

For the next few days Jen stayed in camp and worked at the camping table on the map of the surrounding area, adding detail as she recalled it, and at times sending out a drone out there to take another look.
The plant watched over the progress, perched on one corner of the map, and she watched it.

Jen could have entrusted the entire map-making process to the drones, but she enjoyed the practice of drawing up an accurate map, going from mostly her own recollections and sketching out the big strokes, then coming in with a sharp instrument and filling in the rest.
She found peace in it, and in these moments she felt Helene close to her, sitting at the same table, watching the map.

Helene looked real, for a second, and then she was gone.
Jen shook her head and looked again, but Helene wasn't there.

Jen looked over at the flowering plant.
"Guess you're all ready, eh?" she asked it, then extended a finger and picked up a small globule of sap from the plant.
She smiled and licked it off her finger, enjoyed the sweet and sour and moldy flavor of it, the familiarity of the drug.

The first trip, evening, sunset, Thursday, 41 days

Jen laid back deep inside the adirondack chair, started playing a "Pink Floyd" album on the shuttle external speakers, and prepared for the hallucinations.

The sun was setting, but it was still a couple of diameters above the horizon, almost frozen in place, and lighting up the campsite in languid orange tones.
Jen looked over the campsite and felt a sense of comfort, of safety and warmth.

The campsite sat in a meadow in the crook of a river-bend, so it was surrounded on three sides by water and on one side by the forest.
The forest was sparse in this region of the Canyon, the trees grew thin long branches and didn't encroach on each other's space, and Jen could see for quite a ways.
Tall piny trees stood amidst oceans of mossy growth, a thick carpet of dark green that covered the forest floor in this region.

A creature with similarities to an Earth squirrel ran and jumped through the network of tree branches, and headed in the direction of the campsite.
Jen stood up and noticed a "racoon" by the spot where the river and forest met, a natural junction.

The animals approached the campfire, slowly and in a non-threatening manner.
Jen felt completely safe, knew somehow that the animals were not here to harm her.

A deer walked out of the forest and joined its friends.
To Jen, the whole thing felt like a cartoon that a four-year old may have enjoyed.

Friends were coming together, a party was about to begin!

The animals stood together, then as one they looked ashamed.
There was actual remorse and apology on display.
Jen didn't quite know how she understood that emotion, but it happened, she was able to read it clear as day, as if it was printed on a piece of paper.
She was aware that someone was apologizing to her.

Jen felt light-headed and had to sit, so she slumped back into the adirondack and closed her eyes in an attempt to stabilize herself.
As she sat there and breathed, Jen had a vision.

Jen saw herself from yesterday's interaction, but from a different perspective than her own, saw the fear in her face, the shake of her voice as she told the stranger off.
The anger swept through the vision, then the vision ended, abruptly.
It felt as if the someone had called back the ineffective and fear-inducing stranger.
Someone backed away, and Jen understood the vision.

Jen opened her eyes and the world made a bit more sense.
Someone was apologizing, for causing such a dramatic reaction in Jen.
Someone saw the consequences and thought better, found a softer way to interact.

The animals bowed as one, then dispersed.
The "Pink Floyd" album was nearing the end, a long time had gone by as the animals made their very formal apology.

The fog of the mycena was starting to lift, just as the sun was setting below the horizon.

Jen added wood to the fire, got out a bottle of whisky and poured herself a large drink.
She got a small tablet from the shuttle and on it called up Oz.

Night-time chat with Oz, Thursday, 41 days

Oz smiled back from the pilot's seat of his obviously-flying shuttle, "Ah, hi Jen!
You're amazing, you've convinced me to camp a bit myself.
I'm heading to a 3 month spot in the canyon!"

"I'm so glad!" Jen beamed back and meant it.
"I hope you have a great time.
How long will you be there?"

"Ah, just short of a week, back to work Tuesday or so.
Figured, start small," Oz said and trailed off as he remembered the very real possibility that this was Jen's last camping trip.
"How are you doing?"

"I had a hell of a trip," Jen said.
"I had some sap from that mycena, and... someone apologized for spooking me."

"Ha!
Apologized!
Really?"

"That's what it felt like, yeah," Jen said.
"You know how mycenas are typically a blast of emotions, just knocks you on your ass?"

"Ha, sure, knocks the wind out of you, but also lights up your whole nervous system," Oz agreed.

"The mycenas that most people try are... it's like being shoved into 'curious excitement' pond, 'heartfelt love' river, 'insatiable lust' ocean, like being kicked off a damn cliff into the 'other-worldly wonder at your hands' waterfall.
But this mycena felt like a gentle rain of apology.
It came and left softly, stayed for just a moment to pour emotion into my soul."

"Wow, that sounds amazing," Oz replied and smiled.

Jen saw something in his smile.
"You don't think the Forest talked with me?" Jen asked.

"I'm not doubting anything," Oz replied.
"You had an amazing trip after a freaking deer brought you some magic shrooms.
That lines up.
The Forest must be conscious."

"Or something, yeah," Jen said.

"If you were inclined to send me some of that sap, I'm gonna be in this region," Oz said and shared a map location.
It was a campsite on the shore of a lake, though not one that Jen had been to.

"You're really working hard on that whole live life to the fullest, eh Oz?
First camping, now the freaking mycena?"

"Ah, well, what can I say?" Oz replied and left it at that.

"Yeah," Jen replied eventually.
"But Oz, be careful with this shit, it's quite potent."

"Ha, of course!
I'll get my shuttle to babysit me while I trip, it'll be great!
What are you up to now?" Oz asked.

"Cooking, but I'm just in the damn contemplative phase right now.
It's getting late and I'm starving," Jen replied and sipped on the whisky.
"Let's chat later."

"Absolutely.
Have a good evening!" Oz said.

"Thanks, and the horse you rode in on," Jen said and ended the call.

She started printing a delivery drone and a sample kit.
The kit came out first, and she used it to get three small beads of the mycena sap, then loaded up the sample kit into the delivery drone when that finished up.
Jen tossed the drone up, gently, and called out the coordinates that Oz gave her.

"ETA, 9 hours," the drone chirped and flew upwick, away from The Front, and toward Oz's campsite.
Jen wondered if the drone would pass Oz's shuttle on the way there.
The drone flew slowly through the heavy air of the Wick Canyon, while Oz flitted over the desolate planet, high above.

"Have the trip of your life, Oz.
There's gonna be a welcome package waiting for you," Jen sent a message to Oz.

Thoughts on Oz, Thursday evening, 41 days

"Oz didn't freaking believe me", Jen reflected on the short chat.

Did that matter?

Did she believe that The Forest had apologized?

That's certainly what she felt when she tried the sap, that someone was contrite, but is that what it really was?

Jen tried to recall that trip, tried to remember the feelings that had come crashing through her like a sonic boom.
She felt the regret and the shame, as if they were her own.
The animals had radiated the feeling and she soaked it up like a lizard in the sun.

And Jen realized that she wanted that feeling again, so she took a second dose, put on a different album, laid back in the adirondack chair, and watched the stars twinkle into existence as the sun dropped further behind the planet.

The second trip, Thursday night, 41 days

The sun had disappeared, but its brightness still kept a lot of the stars hidden.
As the sun left, the stars entered the picture.
Jen laid back and watched the stars twinkle into existence in a random-seeming pattern.

"I'm sure Oz knows which ones show up first to the party," she mumbled to herself.
She missed Oz, and that brought unexpected tears.

Something bright dashed across the darkening sky and Helene's shuttle exploded.
Then another bright dash and explosion, then a handful more.
Jen broke into a wail, a long and deeply painful scream as the shuttle kept on exploding, and each time the shuttle came in differently, and she saw the explosion from a different angle.
The explosions tore at Jen's mind, they were an ice-pick right through the right eye, a rod of death that was also the savior from pain.
Jen thanked the life-ender and died.

Death, Thursday night, 41 days

Death was boring, death was bleak, death was nothingness turned up to eleven!

Jen wallowed in death for a while, then blasted out of it, returned to reality, to the campsite where she spent a lovely weekend with Helene, just half a year back, when the forest was much shorter.
When the swath around them was undergoing a Spring, a time of renewal, of birth and creation.

Jen breathed in deep, smelled, tasted, found the air to be a wonderfully salty mixture.
She remembered Earth, the last time she was at the Pacific Ocean.

"So much damn water!
I miss it so much!", Jen thought, as she recalled the deep-buried memory.

Then came the rest of the memories.
The school friends forgotten for twenty years, the parade of former girlfriends some of whose names were lost to time, and all of whom had walked out on Jen.
The deaths of family, specifically those in war zones or buried by natural disasters, flashed past her eyes: great-aunt, grandfather, grandmother, sister, uncle.
The faces were sharp, the cuts were deep, and Jen's emotions boiled over, she screamed and felt her head explode.

Resurrection, sleep, morning catch-up, Thursday-Friday, 41-40 days

Jen woke up in the adirondack chair, outside, under the stars, listening to the last song on the album.
Less than an hour had passed since she sampled the hallucinogenic mycena plant.

Jen stood up, chugged water from the thermos on the table, then crawled into her tent and fell asleep.
The tent zipped itself up after a minute, and Ship re-activated the security system.

Jen woke up to a message from Oz.
It was early, just 6:30 in the morning, and she had gotten used to waking up slowly, leisurely, much later than this.

"That was a freaky trip!", the message from Oz began.
"I recalled some stuff from my childhood, some stuff that happened in Amel.
It was a sobering experience, like watching an educational film.
It was strange, of course!
How about you?"

"Start reply," Jen said out loud and stretched.
She decided to get started early and jumped onto her todos for the day, the first of which was replying to her friend.
"Oz, glad to hear your experience!
My second trip was like yours, it was reminding me of things I'd lost.
Helene, of course, but also people from long ago, from Earth.
Past loves.
It was...
Shit, yeah, educational, as you said.
OK, send."

Jen unzipped the tent and came out into the campsite.
The early frost covered everything in a fine mist of glitter and Jen stood there for a moment and tried to memorize the details, like taking a mental photograph, the first of the last batch.
She wanted to remember this morning forever.

Quickly and with practiced grace that came from weeks in the Canyon, she got a fire started and the coffee bubbling away.
Jen enjoyed the relaxing morning, which was punctuated by a small family of "bear" creatures that carromed through the river past the campsite, upwick, no doubt to their next burrow.
Jen raised her cup of coffee as a salute to the bears, but they just charged through the water, continued on their merry way.

"I miss her so much," came a text message from Oz.
Jen wondered who it was that Oz was talking about.
Is it possible he recalled a lost love?
Or was he just talking about Helene?

She'd never really wondered about Oz's sexuality, not seriously, because it was so very obviously OFF.
But now she wondered if perhaps Oz was still in mourning over his great lost love.

"?" Jen replied.

"I miss my daughter.
She lives in Amel, with my ex-wife."

Oz had never opened up about his past, about his reason for moving to Gant.
Jen herself was running away from her Earth troubles, so neither really pressed the issue of each other's past, just celebrated the present and the future.

"What's your daughter's name?"

"Cairo.
She's fifteen now," Oz replied sadly.
He paused.
"I'm going to write her a letter.
Talk to you later, Jen.
Have a great day."

"Aye, you too, Oz."

Reflections and coffee, Friday, 40 days

Jen sat at the camping table, drank the dark cowboy coffee which she spiced with a bit of Europan whisky, and tried to understand her visions.

The mycena was clearly trying to dredge up memories of sorrow, of immense loss.
The mycena did dredge up those memories, probably because they had sorrow associated with them.

Jen felt a presence, for just a moment, of something out there.
Something within the mycena sap?

Jen wrote down her thoughts and tried to reason through these experiences.

The deer brought the mycena, and the plant's hallucinogenic sap allowed something to plunder Jen's memories for instances of sorrow, of unspeakable loss.
But, Jen noted, the losses were always done to her.

The parade of former girlfriends, of whom there were many, seemed to only include the partners who left Jen, one way or another.
There was Suki, the contortionist who one day dove into a sleep-pod and jetted off towards Andromeda.
She was followed by Aisha, who had the misfortune of being immolated during a rocket-themed orgy.
Jen's body recognized and reacted to the disgusting memory of Ax Ofman, one of the few men that Jen dated, who fell into a meat grinder and was made into a somewhat sub-par hamburger ("waste not...").
And of course there was Helene.
The mycena was determined to dredge up this old shit, Jen thought and wrote, then reconsidered her stance.

My memories are not shit, she wrote down in the notebook and drank more coffee.

Third trip, sunset, Friday sunset, 40 days

The sun was disappearing, hiding behind the planet and lighting up the campsite in orange hues.
The mycena's moist cap glistened in a lurid, erotic fashion in the warm sunset tones.
The hallucinogen-producing organ of the mycena was now starting to look quite sexual and reminded Jen of Helene.
Jen considered the bump at the top of the cap and mentally nicknamed it Pearl.
And of course she had the irresistible urge to polish it, so Jen licked the sticky sap off the cap, and laid down inside her tent, her feet closest to the open flaps.

"Play Anthem of the Peaceful Army", Jen called out, and after a moment Ship obliged and began playing the music through its external speakers.
Jen was introduced to the ancient band by Helene, of course, and this song was one of their favorites to listen to while having sex.

Jen slipped her hand down her panties, touched herself, moved her finger in a circular path, and arched her back as the sensation shot from head to toe.
Jen touched herself to the rhythm of the music and the hallucinogenics started to produce waves of firework explosions that slammed into her at the same tempo.

Jen cried out as every muscle in her body clenched and spasmed, hard, and brought on dam-bursting release.
She collapsed and continued to writhe on the floor of her tent, a peaceful smile on her face.
It had been weeks since she had allowed herself to come, and this was heavenly, and desperately needed.

Jen laid back and breathed for a while, just trying to calm her system, slow her heartbeat, relax and return to the present, to the twilit campsite.

Jen looked out into a bright campsite.

She put on her goggles and stepped out of the tent into a very bright night.
The sky was blazing and the campsite was hot.
As Jen watched, the plants around her curled in on themselves, lost their green sheen, and burst into flames.

Jen's camping outfit was designed for weather fluctuations, but it wasn't doing too well against the blast that threatened to cook everything.
Jen bolted into the shuttle, slammed the SAFEKEEP button and felt the shuttle come alive around herself.
She stumbled into the cockpit and peeled the smoldering clothes off, tossed them into the shower, ran water over them.

Ship sealed itself up and rose to a height of a hundred meters over the campsite.
Then it just sat there and waited for further instructions from Jen.

"Ship, what's going on outside now?
Is everything on fire?"

Negatory, Jen, I am not able to detect any nearby fires, please clarify your query.

"Well, shit," Jen slurred, unsure of what she wanted or needed, but that something was terribly wrong.
"Tranq me, I need to be out right fucking now, orange feather," and Jen was knocked out with a powerful-but-safe amount of sedative even before she finished speaking the code phrase.

Post-trip, Friday evening, 40 days

Jen woke up an hour later, once Ship had run a full tox on her a handful of times and determined that the hallucinogenics were out of her system.

She was inside the shuttle, on the bed, and through Ship's windows she saw only sky.
They were airborne, she finally noticed.

Jen sat down at the captain's chair, rotated it into flying position, and took in the current situation.

A dozen outside cameras showed that the forest was still green and unburned down there.
Jen rewound the footage and it was an unbroken story of nothing much happening.

"Hell of a hallucination," she muttered, then landed the shuttle and stepped outside again.

The world was not on fire, was in fact quite pleasant and peaceful.
The day's last rays were retreating, making way for the stars.

Jen called up Oz on Ship's external speakers, then got a beer and dropped into the adirondack.

"Hey, Oz, you might want to hold off on that hallucinogenic shit."

"Huh?"

"I just had a nasty trip, this batch may be off."

"Oh, darn," came a defeated reply from Oz.

"Well, shit, Oz, that doesn't sound good.
Did you just eat one of the sap samples?"

"Uhh, yeah, the second dose.
Umm, everything's fine here, no worries, this'll be a good trip..." Oz trailed off.

"Ship was able to sedate me pretty quickly, so I didn't feel most of the trip, maybe you can try that?" Jen said, plaintively.
She hoped that Oz was still there, able to hear her, but she doubted it.

"Thanks, Jen, but I think this trip might be important.
I feel it.
And the fireworks are starting...
Good night," Oz said and terminated the call.

Thoughts on the hallucinations, Friday evening, 40 days

Jen sat at the campsite, drank her beer, watched the stars slowly appear overhead, and thought about the hallucination.

What was the brightness over the campsite?
Was it The Front?
Was she seeing her upcoming death?
Was the fire already here?

Jen looked around and saw only clear skies and quiet, sedentary forests.
She brought up a live map of the planet on her lenses and quickly saw The Front in its expected position.
The Front was still more than a month away.

What did she hallucinate?

She tried to imagine what the brightness could be, started making a list of suspects, writing up a detailed list as if this foray was a work assignment, a heavily researched proposal named Did Jen see the future?!.
She was on the fourth volcano theory when Jen's communicator went off.
She looked over and say a text message from Oz.

"I saw destruction.
The Wick Canyon was destroyed."
That was the whole text.

Jen realized that she saw the same thing.

"Well, shit.
I have to see it again," Jen muttered and ran her finger over the mycena sap, then stuck the finger in her mouth.
"Show me what you know," she said to the mushroom.

Fourth trip, Friday evening, 40 days

Jen was determined that this trip would be a learning opportunity.
She regretted not sticking with the last vision, but that was in the past.
Now, though, Jen wondered if she would be more headstrong, more defiant in the face of danger, because of what she missed earlier, because of her regrets.
She shrugged it off, chose to ignore the idea, hoped that was enough to prevent it from sinking its hooks into her.

The sky brightened and Jen flipped her goggles down.
But the goggles were of no use, of course: the blinding light was a hallucination.

Jen looked up, raised a hand in a futile attempt to block out the too-bright spreading spill of light, and noticed the Misa-specific Gate constellation.
The constellation was in such a specific spot, that throughout the year the outer planets of the system "moved through" the Gate.
Jen moved her fingers to align with the planets, turned her hand to mirror the Gate, and snapped the image with her contact lenses.

Even though the lenses couldn't see the same hallucinations that were haunting Jen, they could see her fingers, which were aligned with the hallucinations.
Together with her very precise location, Jen had confidence that she would be able to date this particular hallucination.
And that information would at least tell her if this was a prophecy of things to come, or a memory of a past tragedy.
Or, perhaps, both?

The hallucination of destruction was quite spectacular, and Jen observed it from multiple viewpoints.
Jen watched with her physical eyes and with a third, inner eye, three different points of view, three different perspectives.
The spreading sky-lava poured pure energy down onto the Wick Canyon and blasted away all life in this portion of the planet.
Jen saw panicked deer and bears run toward boiling rivers and lakes, then burn dust in a matter of seconds.
The destruction was centered on Wick Canyon, but a good portion of the planet received a world-ending amount of heat.
Of the twelve domed human cities on the planet, six were within this blast zone, as Jen saw: Amel, Gant, Jinn, Red Hat, Scottsdale, and Shen.

Jen watched the destruction happen around herself, but remained standing, untouched by the blaze.

She felt the presence by its desire.
She felt the presence as it sniffed at her.
Something was after emotion, was hunting for feelings.
It was on Jen's trail, it swallowed up emotion like a planet-sized vacuum, something out of a Mel Brooks sci-fi film.

Jen felt the presence and kicked, deployed an emotional barb that staggered it.
The presence backed away, disappeared into the nearby non-burning forest, and at the same instant the hallucinations faded, reality flooded back in.

WTF, after the trip, Friday night, 40 days

"What the fuck was that?", Jen wondered aloud.

She was entirely sober, completely clear-headed, just a few minutes after ingesting the hallucinogenics.
Jen briefly speculated that if she were to ask the shuttle to run a blood test on her, they'd see that all the trip-inducing chemicals were gone.

"Well, shit, there's obviously something slash someone here, and it's curious.
Conscious and curious?"

Jen recalled the Gate constellation from her vision.
She looked up into the same general area of the sky and saw two bright shining dots.
Her lenses said that the bright dots were Begel and Jung, the two outermost planets in orbit around Misa's star Hydgens.

Jen popped up the image she took earlier, overlaid it on her lenses to the exact position and orientation from the recording.
She brought up her hand, held it in the same orientation as her vision.
The two bright dots were in different positions from where Jen's fingers were.

"Hell yeah, the destructive vision was from a different time!", Jen said to herself.
"Ship, let's figure out what has to happen for these two planets to be in this orientation", Jen asked and pantomimed with her hands to make certain Ship understood her request.

Of course.
The orientation you have shown will be attained in five days.

"Well shit.
How certain are you?"

This particular orientation happens on a period of nine million years, and the next event is coming up in five days.
I've confirmed this through multiple planetary models and offline intelligences.

"Shit, okay, okay, I get it.
So in five days, the sky burns and we're all fucked?"

That is what it sounds like, from your descriptions so far, Ship put in.

Jen looked askew at the Red Baron and considered Ship's provenance, its emotional stability.
She had run diagnostics, of course, at the start of the trip and every day, but was it possible that something snuck in?

But if she could not trust her only resource on this trip...

Jen needed to sleep on this.

Memories of bad times, welcome sleep, Saturday night, 39 days

Jen laid in her tent and tried to sleep, but the vision kept running through her head.
Jen reached for the bottle of Europan whisky and chugged it, drank down about eight shots, then resealed the bottle and tossed it gently towards a far away corner.

"Let's do a 15 minute bedtime routine," Jen spoke and the colorful tattoos on her left arm shifted, formed different letters and lines.
Jen poked a green check-mark and rested.

Jen thought about the last time she and Helene had fought.
It was a week before the Incident, when Jen tried to initiate sex but was rebuffed by an angry Helene.
They never did settle that argument and Jen still had no idea what she had done wrong, but she spent the night in her shuttle, while Helene stayed in the apartment.
When Jen walked into the house the next day, in the morning, Helene was still sitting on the couch, still enmeshed in a virtual game.
She had stayed up all night long, playing a game where she wielded a realistic katana and used to slice realistic opponents into shreds, and with each kill she was rewarded with tantalizing electric shocks all over her body.

"You were out there, I didn't know what to do, without you," Helene said softly at Jen's questioning look.

They embraced and went to bed together, and Helene slept soundly.

Jen remembered the sensation of being Helene's pillow, of holding her as she quietly dreamt.

Jen cried at the memory, and the first hints of SleepWell started to tug at her mind, dragging her down to dream's domain.

Coffee, the Stranger comes back, Sunday morning, 38 days

Jen took her second sip of the first coffee of the day, when the shuttle's security alarm went off and announced that there was a visitor incoming.

Jen picked up the closest tablet and opened the surveillance notification.
The drones showed that the Stranger was approaching from downwick, from The Front.
The Stranger did not walk, he simply appeared.
He spent a few seconds at a spot, then he would appear a few feet farther on.
The Stranger maintained an average speed of 3 miles an hour as he approached the campsite in his odd way.

The Stranger wore the same gray hiking gear, a green backpack, and a dark-green wooden mask, the same attire he had worn every time she'd seen him.

Jen noticed that the Stranger seemed masculine, in some way.
A masculine hiker statue that teleported itself around.
This, to Jen, was much better than the creepy way the Stranger moved that one time.

Jen picked up her rifle and stood up next to the campfire, carefully keeping the fire between herself and the visitor.

The Stranger approached and came up to the campfire.
The dark-brown mask was smiling, it looked different from what Jen remembered.

Jen sensed the presence and its morbid curiosity about her feelings.
But it was subtle, non-intrusive, curious and looking, but not leering, it was not invading Jen.

The Stranger was creepy, weird, and radiated strangeness like a furnace.
But it kept itself at bay.

Emotions and all that, Sunday morning, 38 days

The Stranger shifted and the mask suddenly had a questioning look.
It looked as if the bark grew into a human face, a face stuck in a single expression, as if they died from curiosity and were then fossilized with long languid tendrils of light wood.
The dead eyes of the mask stared curiously at Jen.

She stared back, and for a moment she glimpsed the bright night sky, the destruction, the mega-deaths.
It was a serene glance, a short moment of clarity.

The Stranger clearly had some understanding of human emotions, however rudimentary that understanding was.
The Stranger was capable of reading Jen's emotional state, and he could influence that emotional state by dropping hallucinations of... "what exactly?" Jen said out loud, as she thought about the Stranger.

"Why are you showing that to me?", Jen asked and tried to radiate curiosity.

The Stranger's face shifted and Jen was looking into Jen's own face, molded in beautiful oak, wearing a textbook expression of sorrow.
Jen picked up desires, that the Stranger was radiating, and among these was the desire for sorrow of loss.
The Stranger was searching for this emotion, and the emotional hounds now screamed for him, feverish as they were, as they sensed Jen's emotional landscape.

A very strong memory of Helene floated to the surface and so did Jen's feelings.
She bawled and collapsed into a ball, just as she did on that fateful day when Helene's shuttle exploded.

The Stranger stood still, but Jen could feel her thoughts being examined, her memories consumed by a hungry mind.
The Stranger listened and gorged himself on Jen's sorrow.
And she felt relief, as she shared her lowest state of being, the dark spot where the future holds no hope.

The Stranger shifted and the dark bark was carved into a smile, and in that same moment Jen felt waves of happiness radiating from the Stranger.

"You... wanted my memories of Helene?
You wanted to experience my sorrow?"
Jen was perplexed.

The Stranger just stared, the smile still carved in the bark.

"You can see my thoughts, right?" Jen asked rhetorically, and thought of the burning sky.
"What is going to happen?"
Jen mimicked the look of rapt curiosity that the Stranger showed her earlier.

The Stranger shifted and suddenly he was holding up a mycena cap, an obscene red mass of pulp, already fertile with hallucinogenic sap.

Jen extended a finger and got a sticky bead, licked it up, and plopped down into the adirondack chair.
"Start voice recording," she said softly.

Recording of fifth trip, Sunday morning, 38 days

Recording from Wick Canyon, my fifth hallucinogenic trip from imbibing mycena sap, Jenny Hikari speaking.

Jen here, I just ingested some hallucinogenic sap, which was offered to me by a humanoid (but a decidedly non-human representation) of the Wick Canyon.

I am looking at an asteroid.
A big rock in space, I think, though there's nothing to give context enough to measure the damn thing.
It is very bright, and also the deepest dark I've ever 'seen'.
It's flying through a solar system.
The system is Hydgens, I definitely recognize Misa.

I follow the asteroid as it approaches the planet.
It is a rocky asteroid, and Misa barely has an atmosphere.
Shit, we still need air masks to walk around outside of a dome.
The asteroid is going to lose a few grains of sand to the thin atmosphere, and then it'll shatter into a trillion pieces as it smacks into Misa at some ridiculous speed.
The last time that happened, the planet rang for two whole days.
Now everyone has a set of special earplugs hanging around their necks for just such an occasion.
And of course we're keeping a better eye on the sky.

Right after Helene died, we really stepped up our game.

Fuck.

OK, staying on track here.

I'm watching as the asteroid approaches the planet at a very shallow angle.
From the side, I can see that the asteroid is flying along the atmosphere, parallel to it, not approaching and not retreating.

Ah!
There was a bright flash!
And now the asteroid has split up.
It's now seven distinct pieces.

Yeah, should have known this would happen, it's a rocky, fragile-

Whoa!

There were more flashes!

And the seven asteroids, they're all gone, now it's a shit-ton of them!
They're spreading out, like a cloud.
It's actually kind of beautiful.

Whoa, a lot of flashes!

The asteroids are innumerable!
They form clouds and nebula, and within it all are more and more flashes!

The flashes keep coming, the asteroids are getting smaller and smaller, and the cloud of them keeps getting larger.
I can't fit them all into my field of view, I have to look around in order to see the faint outlines of former rocks.

The asteroids keep splitting and the once-brown cloud evaporates, and portions of it turn invisible, the asteroids are now too small to identify at such a distance.
The cloud cleared and I can see the Wick Canyon.
The asteroid disintegrated into a mist, right over the Canyon.
Wow.
Hell of a view I've got here, on top of the world.
I can see the entire Canyon from here.

The empty space between me and the planet is taking on a strange orange hue.
White clouds begin to form between me and the planet.
The white clouds glow, the blue ocean fades to a sepia tone, the whole damn planet starts to glow and I feel the heat of a thousand suns on my skin.
It burns!

Waking up, a call, White Sky, Sunday morning, 38 days

Jen woke up in the adirondack chair.
It was morning, a cup of cold coffee sat on the table, and the Stranger was gone.

Jen looked at the inside of her left arm, poked at a few shifting tattoos.
"Send text transcript to Oz and start a video call," she said and got a new cup of coffee.

"Ah, morning Jen!
Just got-", and Oz trailed off as he looked on the text attachment.
After a few moments he looked back toward Jen.
"Asteroid hallucination?"

"Yeah, I just tried some sap from the Stranger, and it showed me this shit.
I think the world's about to end, we're all about to die.
What do you see?"

The silence stretched on as Oz read the account and tried to picture it in his mind.

"Jen, you saw a White Sky happening."

"Well, shit, can't possibly be good if there's a term for it!
Help me out, Oz, what the hell is a White Sky?"

"Let's say you drop a bowling ball from orbit on Earth.
Earth has a thick atmosphere, and the bowling ball will burn up as it grinds against all that air.
The bowling ball's entire mass will be converted to heat energy by the atmospheric drag.
But if you drop the same bowling ball onto Misa, you'll get a different result."

"Misa's atmosphere is damn near non-existent, sure," agreed Jen.

"So as the bowling ball falls from orbit through Misa's thin atmosphere, it'll lose a very small portion of its mass to friction, about a grain of sand, all told and said.
So that's a grain of sand's worth of energy - about a third of a 'calorie' - added to the atmosphere."

"Shit, think I'm starting to see where you're going with this."

"Yeah, Jen, it's pretty much what you expect.
When you split the bowling ball in two, you get twice the surface area, so you'll lose two grains of sand to the atmosphere.
Two grains of sand, that's almost a whole calorie!
And if you split the bowling ball into a 10 million grains of sand, you burn 10 million grains of sand, which is three million calories, coming out as direct heat in the atmosphere.
But the asteroid you saw was probably much bigger than a bowling ball.
What you saw was a weapon that cooks the surface of Misa.
Someone really wants to mess up the planet, you know?"

"But why the fuck would they want to blast the surface of Misa?
It's already a damn hellscape," Jen replied.
"No, this is a way to blast the Canyon, has to be."

"The Canyon, and many of our settlements," Oz reminded.

"Fuck, you're right, Oz!
None of our infrastructure can withstand a White Sky event.
And the survivors will still be fucked: two-thirds of our food production will be destroyed, virtually all of the space-freight landing sites will be gone.
We can try to get some people into space, away from the White Sky, but there's no way in hell we can feed and house them up there, or back on the ground.
There will be chaos and mass deaths, and the Misa colony will be dead within a year."

"Yeah," was all that Oz could say.

"There's a fucking doomsday weapon on its way here.
And a different acid trip told me that this asteroid is going to be here in four days."

Oz absorbed that.
Then he vomited.
Jen heard him, and vomited in solidarity.

Alert and research, Sunday, 38 days

"First things fucking first!" Jen exclaimed.
"We alert the Board about this, even though they'll probably not believe us.
Then we find that asteroid, and blast it out of the fucking sky!"

"Oorah!" Oz responded, excited about the prospect of kicking rocks and saving lives.

"So, Oz, this is a bit of a forward question but... you know where I'm camping, don't you?"

Silence stretched on for a bit too long.

"Hey, shit, not a big deal, what with the end of the world," Jen laughed at the absurdity.
"But how did you do it?
Was it the sonic booms from those drones, about two weeks back?"

Silence still.
Jen had been instantly suspicious of the drones when they made their appearance, of course: it wasn't common for supersonic aircraft to buzz the Wick Canyon, and certainly they didn't usually follow the course of the river.

"Ah, yeah, that's exactly what I did," Oz admitted and Jen could hear the regret, the shame in his voice.
"I'm so incredibly sorry Jen."

Now that Oz confirmed his scheme, Jen wasn't sure how she felt.
She didn't feel betrayed, for some reason, but did feel Oz's love and attention.
But at the very least, she was pissed at Oz for the invasion of her privacy, so that was something, Jen considered.

"Hey, Oz, fuck you, that's my privacy, and it's in the past now," Jen sighed and took a moment.
"Why don't you camp here with me, we can work on this shit together?"

"Right you are!
Be there in a few hours."

"I'm gonna go off this channel for a while, see you when I see you."

"Bye, Jen.
Sorry-", but the apology was cut off as Jen switched her radio link over to the Board frequency.

"Good morning, Jen, Talia here once again," the administrator was in her office, in what seemed like station morning, a big cup of coffee on the table in front of her.
"What can I help you with?"

"I believe a doomsday asteroid is on its way toward Misa, and will be here in ninety hours.
It'll burn up over the Wick Canyon very early on Thursday morning."

"Right, ma'am," Talia responded after a short pause.
"And how did you come by this very specific information?"

"I saw it in a hallucinogenic vision.
The Canyon also spoke to me, told me of things to come."

"I see."
Talia began typing quickly, and her eyes darted quickly from side to side.
"Ma'am, I'm going to send your warning up to the Station Commander.
You will be able to refer to case JL8-156 for follow ups, and of course I'm sending all of this to your mailbox.
So, please, go on."

Jen went over the events that happened, in chronological order, and Talia dutifully took it all down and treated every description as simple fact.
Station AI was of course recording the call and was running its own analysis of Jen's speech and mannerisms, so this call was practically a polygraph for Jen.
Talia was quickly convinced, even without looking at Station's report, that she needed to follow up on this thread.

After the call wrapped up, Jen sat in her adirondack, sipped the Europan whisky that she was finally developing a taste for, and considered that life would never be boring again.
This moment, here, right now, was going to be the last calm moment that Jen would have for a very long time.
She looked around and tried to absorb her surroundings deep into her soul, willed herself to write the beauty and the simplicity of the world into her very DNA.

Research, Sunday evening, 38 days

Oz's Green Machine started out as a dot on the horizon that just kept getting bigger.
Oz knew exactly where Jen was, so he took his shuttle pretty much straight up, then performed a "controlled fall" toward her campsite.
This way, with a direct line of sight between them, Oz was able to maintain radio contact with Jen's Ship for all of that time.

Jen still ignored his calls, but at least Oz could coordinate logistics with someone at the campsite.

Jen started mentally referring to the evil asteroid doomsday weapon as Tempest, then she began talking about it with Ship, and so now they hunted for the Tempest.
By the time that Oz landed, Jen had found three possible asteroids, three candidates for Tempest.

Oz approached the command center Jen had setup on the bank of the river: a dozen holo displays made sky-scrapers of data appear over the campsite and the river, reports and findings were hunted down and pinned up with tacks, red string running all around these towers of knowledge.
At the center were three outlines of the potential Tempest asteroids, and under each one was one of Jen's code names for the asteroids: Winnie on the left, Sarah in the middle, Mary on the right.

"Winnie is going to miss the atmosphere by a hundred klicks, or more," Oz pointed to the left-most asteroid.
"And Mary," he said, pointing to the right, "she is too heavy, too stable, won't break up like they want it to.
So that just leaves Sarah, in the middle."

"Fucking right, I just concluded that myself, glad we're finally on the same page!"
Jen stood up from the control center and bear-hugged Oz, the last person she ever expected to see again.

"Jen, I've missed you, so much," Oz said through tears.

Jen was unable to speak, so she just hugged Oz tighter.
After a minute she let go and came back to the control pod.

"Right, so Sarah seems about right, for a damn doomsday weapon," Jen said and pointed to the only remaining candidate asteroid.
"She's got the right orbit, the correct size, she's going to be zooming by in five days..."

"Ah, there is a 'but' coming."

"...but her composition isn't really what we're expecting," Jen nodded in agreement.
"It's made of ice and iron, possibly the remnant of a comet.
I've been running simulations for the past few hours, and there's just no damn way for it to break up like the vision showed, no way to create a White Sky with that kind of composition.
I think we need to look for an S-type asteroid, something rocky: a rubble pile, in the astronomy parlance."

"Ah, so three down, need to keep searching," Oz said sadly.
He hadn't realized how much hope he had pinned on the asteroid nicknamed Sarah, how much he needed to find the doomsday weapon as soon as humanly possible.

"Yup, but it can wait until tomorrow," Jen replied as she saw the sadness in Oz.
"I'm freaking starving, let's go make kebabs and have some beers!"

Oz hauled a cooler full of Gant microbrew beer out of the Green Machine, Jen started rolling out the kebabs and tossed on an old rock album.

The first toast of the evening was to this reunion, and the rest were to finding Tempest before it was too late.

The search, futility, Monday morning, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

Jen and Oz started their morning and the search for Tempest when the sky grew bright.
Oz built a fire and started making breakfast.
Jen printed and setup an automated caffeine system, then brewed two strong cups of coffee and carried one to Oz.
On the side of each cup, Jen added an illustration of Wick Canyon and the words "Wick Canyon Preservation Society", which were printed in big blocky letters and colored a modest golden.

"Ah, this makes it official, love it!" Oz exclaimed and happily raised his cup in toast to this endeavor.

While Oz cooked breakfast, Jen sent out dozens of requests for telescope time on every system satellite she could find.
Most of these satellites were in orbit around Misa, but there were a few that orbited Hydgens, the system's star, and even a few "dark" satellites that occupied a number of L2 orbits, hiding from the star behind one of her planets.
There weren't a lot of other researchers using the satellites, so Jen's requests went through at a steady pace, and her algorithms were finding a new asteroid once every few seconds.
At first Jen had an alarm setup for these findings, but pretty quickly she found out that most of the located asteroids weren't relevant: they were either the wrong size or they were at the wrong place, and couldn't possibly be Tempest.

By midday Jen had discarded hundreds of possibilities and incidentally became the most prolific local asteroid finder, as she added all those non-Tempest asteroids to the multiple tracking databases.
But they were still no closer to finding Tempest.

Over lunch, Oz told Jen the story of gremlins.

Gremlins, Monday afternoon, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

"Ah, so, have you heard of gremlins?
Possibly at work?" Oz asked Jen and sipped on his beer.
The two were having lunch at the campsite, away from the control center where they did their research, as a way of creating a clear separation between work and relaxation.

"Gremlins?
Ugly little fuckers?"

"Ah, sure, those, but what you're talking about is the cultural prototype!
That gremlin is a little ugly monster, creeps around for its own strange reasons.
But what I was asking is the gremlins at work.
Have you ever heard anyone claim that a gremlin stole a tool, or smashed a screen, or whatever?"

"Nah, can't say I have...", Jen said and trailed off, a look of recognition in her eyes.
"Might have overheard an old timer saying something about a gremlin in the ducts."

"Right, so it's these gremlins that I want to tell you about," Oz said and took a bite of his sandwich.
The bread was fresh-baked paste, as were the fillings and the condiments.
It tasted like salami and smelled like peppers, and it was one of Helene's favorite recipes.
Jen had shared the recipe for it, and Oz prepared it to spec for himself.
It was a great sandwich, Oz would freely admit, but he was already thinking of the modifications he might make to it, in the future.

But the delicious sandwich was a bit distracting, so Oz put it down and pushed the plate away from himself a bit.

"Back on Earth, during World War Two, pilots on both sides of the conflict started to experience bizarre malfunctions in their planes.
The tightly-wound crews were often in stressful situations, what with the war and all, and were even more likely to make mistakes.
And when mistakes happened, in those early days of air forces, they could easily turn fatal.
The crews came up with 'gremlins' to explain lapses in discipline and the malfunctions that arose.
'Gremlins' caused trouble, but they were also a common enemy that everyone could work against.
No longer was it just 'Oh, Tommy messed up and killed us', it now became 'the gremlins are working with Hitler to bring us down, but we won't back off!'.
Some historians claim that gremlins built up morale among pilots and allowed the Royal Air Force to repel the Luftwaffe during the First Battle of Britain.
Some say that if gremlins didn't 'exist', the Allies would have lost that war."

"Gremlins are a joint social fiction, in other words," Jen offered.

"Ah, sure!
You can even think of gremlins as alternative reality.
You can either choose the reality where one of your brothers messed up and possibly doomed you, or you can choose a reality where magic creatures are making life difficult for you.
One of those approaches makes it easier to live and work with other people."

"That's gremlins, eh?
And what the hell does that have to do with our situation?"

"Jen, do you have gremlins?
Do you prefer a different reality?
There are plenty of reasons to hate this reality, a reality where Helene died.
But are you replacing reality with a scavenger hunt?"

"Fuck, is that what you think is happening?
Oz, the fucking Deer brought this shit to me, I didn't go seeking it out!
And the suggestion that I invented this apocalypse because I can't deal with Helene's death, that's such bullshit!"

"Withdrawn, counselor!" Oz replied and held up his hands in a suggestion of surrender.

"But you do raise a good fucking point," Jen said and came over to the mycena that sat in the printed pot on the camp table.
She reached out and scooped up a large bead, licked it, then settled into her adirondack chair.
"Keep an eye on me, the two of you," Jen addressed Oz and Ship simultaneously.

Attempts at understanding, another trip, Monday afternoon, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

Jen looked up into the clear sky and waited for the stars to appear.
Oz sat to her right, in his own adirondack chair, and watched her with fascination.
In one hand he held one of the microbrew beers from Gant, and in the other he held a pair of field binoculars.
He raised those and looked in the same direction that Jen was facing.

"Sim speed ten ex," he mumbled and the binoculars showed a view of the planets flitting across the darkening heavens.

Jen started to see her own sped-up hallucination start to form, and she watched the planets align in three days time, and then the Tempest showed up.
The hallucinations once again took Jen closer to the asteroid and she watched the rock magically unfold itself into a trillion pieces and disappear.

"Stop," Jen commanded, and to her surprise the hallucination actually did pause.
The cloud of particles stopped expanding and sat there, in between Jen and Misa, and colored the whole planet with a light brown hue.
"Well, shit, this thing is interactive, after all," Jen said to no one in particular.

"Can it wind back?
Can you go back?" Jen said.
She wasn't talking to Oz, he figured she must be talking to the hallucination, the trip.

Jen brought up her arms and tried to gesticulate her meaning and hoped that the responsive hallucinogenic drugs would take the hint.
After a few seconds, they did, and time flowed backwards: the dust came together and slowly re-formed the asteroid.

When the seven largest pieces were back together, just before they'd started to separate, Jen stopped the vision again.

"Well, shit, now what?" Jen asked no one in particular.
"I've managed to pause and rewind the vision, but what the hell do I do now?"

"Ah, Jen, the mycena communicates feelings, right?
Can you try to 'feel' what you want the hallucination to do?"

"Fuck, how do I 'feel' that this asteroid should miss the planet?" Jen replied, then sat still and tried it anyway.

Jen thought of pushing the great rock, pictured it mentally, watched it again and again and tried to see how she felt about it.
Then the asteroid obliged, and moved away from Misa, flew on past the planet.

The hallucination ended, suddenly, and Jen was back at the campsite.

"What the shit?" she said to a similarly confused Oz.

Oz trips, unexpected confirmation, Monday afternoon and evening, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

Oz volunteered for the next trip, so while he was off hallucinating Jen kept on searching for Tempest.

She scoured the system network and was surprised to see a huge trove of archival documents recently released by the Misa Orbital Science Station.
The document drop was strange because of how large it was, around a million times larger than the usual uninspiring press releases and discovery announcements.
Jen started the download and instructed Ship to start combing through the trove.

After a minute, Ship piped up: Jen, I believe someone at MOSS is trying to send us a message.

"Doesn't anyone use email anymore?!" Jen roared in frustration.
"OK, what makes you say that?"

This archive of documents contains some ancient, pre-Misa astronomical observations. There are, in fact, over half a million photographs in the Harvard Plate Archive alone, and hundreds of thousands from other sources.

"Shit, and?"

Close to a hundred images have been oddly tagged, in the HPA and other archives, as if someone was drawing my attention to these, without being very obvious. The tagged images are all of the same patch of sky as seen from Earth, and all of the images are from the same date, some seven hundred years ago.

"Fuck.
Let me guess, they all inadvertently captured images of Misa."

Not just pictures of Misa, but of the White Sky. The spectral analysis confirms our current theories of how this weapons system works.

"Shit.
So the White Sky is a regular occurrence?
Guess that's how the forest knows about it.
The forest is expecting the White Sky.
Knows that death is coming, knows that it will kill us all."
Jen looked up into the sky for a moment before continuing.
"Why hide this information?
Who do you think is sending this message?"

I believe that the MOSS Mind may be trying to follow conflicting orders. From my analysis, it is obvious that the tagging was done by an artificial person, they all but signed it as 'MOSS Mind'. The Board, the humans in charge of the station, disagree with you, they are not convinced of any danger. This leads me to believe that the Mind must agree with you. The Board is still trying to deny the White Sky and Tempest, which is why the Mind had to resort to these tactics. But it clearly believes us.

"Us?" Jen raised her eyebrow at that statement.

We are all in this together, Jen. If you fail in this mission, the White Sky will end me as well.

"Ah, Jen, that thing you called the Presence?" Oz inserted himself into the conversation by speaking up for the first time in an hour.
"The Presence is the forest, and it visited me.
It wants to understand sorrow."

Theories, Monday evening, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

The dinner was cooked, the cold beers were popped open, and Jen had just started playing an old album on the camp's distributed speaker net.
The smell of fatty meat charring over a roaring fire, a sensation that was shared by Jen, Oz, and billions of their ancestors of Earth, was something that Jen thought of frequently as she ended the day around a roaring blaze.
The smell of ganja from Oz's pipe added vast numbers of college students to the shared experience.

"Ah, let's say the obvious one first: the forest wants our help in stopping Tempest," Oz offered as the opening theory of the night.

"Then, shit, it's sending very conflicting signals.
Every time I've tried to prevent the White Sky, the forest kicked me out.
How much clearer does it get?"

Oz shrugged at that and took a bite of charred "deer", its purple tissues oozing fat all over his fingers, and nodded.
"I concede, Jen, the forest thinks the White Sky is inevitable."

"Aye, the damn thing doesn't think things can change."
Jen shook her head and pondered the psychology of... whatever the forest is.

Why is the forest learning about sorrow?, Ship asked.

Oz and Jen looked at the Red Baron with curiosity.

"Ah, Ship, nice of you to join us," Oz smiled.
"What are your thoughts?"

Jen winced, minutely, at the thought of another Ship lecture.
She reached over and grabbed Oz's ganja pipe and inhaled, deep, before settling in further into her adirondack.
She drew a fuzzy blanket over her form, nestled in, and hoped sleep would come instantly.

The White Sky event is a regular occurrence on this planet. There is evidence of this in every village that will be impacted by the White Sky, evidence that wasn't noticed because the colonists were too busy bootstrapping society to bother with minor irregularities in the geological record of this planet. The period of the White Sky is once every 937 years, and early Earth scientists were able to notice a White Sky event two cycles back. We have their photographs, every nuance of the theory matches up, and tells us this: the White Sky is GOING to happen. The early scientists attributed the flare to a fluke and never followed up, but the Mind aboard MOSS obviously worked the truth out, and released this archive, and the secret message within: the MOSS Mind believes Jen.

"Ah, well, damn, I should be more specific next time," Oz smiled around a lit pipe.
"You asked why the forest is learning about sorrow.
So, what do you think about that?
And why is sorrow the important question?"

Jen looked crestfallen, but Oz was missing out, he didn't understand.

"Hey, what are you thinking?" Oz asked.

"How many intelligent species have we met?" Jen asked, somber, quiet.

"None.
We're the only ones, so far," Oz replied, still not following.

"The forest has been alone for a long time here, living and maturing in this weird environment, only for a killer asteroid to reset the whole thing every millennia or so.
And we're the first other intelligence it has ever encountered.
And now it knows that we're going to be wiped out, in three days, and it's wanting to understand sorrow, because that's what it's attempting to feel.
The forest wants to learn about sorrow, so it is able to properly respond to our deaths."

In a nutshell, yes, that is my theory, Ship helpfully added.

"The forest is convinced that White Sky is a vital part of its life, and it won't be convinced otherwise.
Fuck."

Perhaps the forest simply cannot imagine White Sky not happening. But what if you, Jen, showed an alternate reality to the forest?

"Alternate reality?
The hell does that mean?"

Jen, the forest has been dredging your memories for sorrowful events, in order to learn how you reacted to those events. What if, instead of sharing that memory, you show the forest a different possibility: a world where the asteroid is deflected, and the White Sky doesn't happen.

"You mean, we pipe some generated memories into my head, so I can dump them into the forest, to convince it that White Sky is avoidable?
And then, all together, we find a way to stop the Tempest."

Correct, Jen, and very to the point.

"Feel free to mimic that behavior, eh?" Jen smiled.
"OK, that seems like a reasonable approach, let's see if we can convince the forest to help us out.
Ship, start rendering the deflection scenario, I can try 'recalling' it to the forest."

The fake memory, the trip, Monday night, 37 days to Front, 3 days to White Sky

Jen switched on her goggles, and the campsite went away, replaced in Jen's eyes first by the darkness of space, then the scattered lights of human settlements as seen from orbit, and finally the Front, burning its way through a curved stretch of Wick Canyon.
An asteroid drifted into view and Jen approached it, floated closer until the rocky surface resolved itself into a pile of gravel held together by tar-black spider-web tendrils.

Jen watched her hands come up in the vision, and felt a strange tug at her own extremities, her real-life arms wanting to follow the visual lies.
Then her hands touched the gravely asteroid and pushed.

The asteroid moved just a tad, just a millimeter at first, but the rendered 'memory' was already communicating that the asteroid would meet its doom, through subtle visual cues that Ship must have picked up from Hollywood films.
Jen smiled and watched as the asteroid moved away from her, dove down toward the planet and traced out the wrong trajectory, a path that did not lead to armageddon.
The asteroid came in too soon, too fast, it dove through the thin stratosphere at too steep of an angle, and the faint streams of nitrogen attempted to rip the rock to shreds but inevitably failed.
Some of the tar-black tendrils tore, evaporated, gave way and splintered the rock pile into smaller pools of gravel, which floated apart but never had a chance to dissolve into a deadly sandstorm.
The vision pulled back to encompass the growing debris field, then suddenly the rocks encountered the planet and became dust.

The night was undisturbed, the faint glow of the villages shone on, the settlers inside completely ignorant of the sudden death that could have annihilated them.
The vision pulled further back, time accelerated, and sunshine flooded the Wick Canyon, and life went on for another day.

Jen wept at the skillfully-crafted vision and played it again and again.

She felt ready after half an hour.

Oz poured her a glass of Europan whisky and spread a warming blanket over her adirondack chair.
Jen scooped up a globule of mycena sap with her finger, and quickly licked it, then settled into her chair and toasted Oz.

"Fuck the apocalypse!"

"Sláinte!" Oz raised a drink of his own.

The trip, Tuesday afternoon, 36 days to Front, 2 days to White Sky

The vision came on slowly, the colors of the afternoon sky replaced by the vast sparse darkness of the nighttime.
The stars twinkled and moved quickly across the heavens, as the sap unfolded a sped-up story of the White Sky and the devastating fires that descended upon the forest.

Jen felt as though she was wading through a stream of frigid water.
She started out with just her toes touching the gentle waves, then she walked in as the vision started up in earnest.
Walked until the water lapped at her knees, felt the constant pull and push of the water, not yet enough to topple her, but certainly putting that possibility in her head.

The sap pushed the narrative of the apocalypse with calm and determination, and Jen felt as though she was standing up to her hip in a river that threatened to sweep her form away.

Jen pushed her memories of the skillfully-crafted vision, and instantly felt pushback.
It felt as if the river suddenly sped up and threatened to uproot Jen and take her away.

She pushed the memories, stepped up the brewing anger inside of her and used that emotion to push at the sap.

Then, suddenly, she was back, the vision retreated and felt like it wasn't even there.

"No," Jen said and shook her head.
"No, it wouldn't even hear me out."

The search, the announcement, Tuesday afternoon, 36 days to Front, 2 days to White Sky

A day of searching the skies, and Jen and Oz didn't have much to show for it.
The campsite and the river shore were littered with the detritus of the madcap research dash that Jen and Oz undertook overnight: empty stay-awake dispensers, half-finished cigarettes, started and abandoned meals, already-decomposing containers of microbrew beer.
They'd located dozens of new asteroids around Misa, but none of those were the Tempest, the White Sky-causing planet-killer asteroid from the visions.

Jen rubbed her tired eyes and faced Oz.

"Fuck it, we're not getting any closer, and we haven't heard back from the Station.
I'm going to send out the warning."

Oz shook his head but said nothing.

"Ship, record a message for the Misa public forum, title: Upcoming destruction," Jen dictated to the ship.
"Residents of Misa, this is Jen Hikari, and I believe the Misa colony is in danger.
I believe that in two days, on Thursday at around 2 in the morning Gant time, an asteroid will break up over the Wick Canyon, and will cause a White Sky scenario.
Technical specs on the White Scenario are attached, these were developed by Osmond Fielding, and double-checked by Misa Orbital Science Station General Access AI 44, but long story short, the sky will turn white as the asteroid burns up and irradiates the surface of the planet.
Temperatures will reach incredibly high levels, and most of our infrastructure will be outright destroyed.
I believe..." and here Jen hesitated, for the first time, once again contemplating whether the truth would hurt or help her campaign.
In the end, Jen decided to let her gut take over.
"I had multiple hallucinogenic visions during my stay in the Wick Canyon, and that's where I saw the killer asteroid and the White Sky.
I understand this may be hard to believe, but please, you must.
The White Sky is a recurring event, as shown by early Earth astronomical research.
Attached to this message, in addition to the White Sky details, are the recordings I've made of my encounters with an intelligence that appears to represent the forest within the Wick Canyon.
I've seen the destruction that will be visited upon this planet, upon the Wick Canyon, and on the following six cities that are within the White Sky range: Amel, Gant, Jinn, Red Hat, Scottsdale, and Shen.
Please take this warning seriously and take precautions."

Jen tapped at a tattoo on her arm and the ship sent the message out to the public Misa forum, where eyes all across the colony would soon be scanning the theories and the evidence that Oz, Jen, and Ship had compiled.

Jen started playing one of Helene's favorite albums on the outside speakers and began making dinner.
Oz got more beers.

"Jen, are you going to stay here?"

"Fuck, I'm still thinking about it.
I was supposed to have another month here, another month to remember Helene, to mourn her, to decide if life is still worth living, all that shit, you know.
And now instead of a month, the end of my world is in two days!
It's not fair!
Agghhhhh!" Jen screamed into the night air, then came back to folding Paste as if nothing happened.
"Shit, I dunno, still thinking about it.
How about you?"

"Ah, I got family in Cheoban, on the other side of the planet.
Might stay with them."

"'Might'?
The fuck does that mean?"

"Ah, well, Jen, that just means that I'm in the same conundrum as you.
You're my closest, only friend, if we're being honest, and I've been going over things, and I don't have an answer.
I don't know if I want to live in a world without you."

"Shit, Oz, you need to get out more often.
Also, that's a really shit thing to hang on me, at this point.
You can't just say that you're going to off yourself if I choose to stay in the forest, that's fucking messed up."

"Ah, if you can fuck off to die in the forest, so can I!" Oz responded.

It was the first time Jen had heard Oz swear, and it was a fascinating experience.
She couldn't help but laugh right in Oz's face.

He responded in kind.
They had beers and talked about the old days.

Tempest candidate, Wednesday morning, 35 days to Front, 1 day to White Sky

The call came in early on Wednesday, less than a day before the predicted White Sky, and just a bit into morning coffee for Jen and Oz.

"Jen Hikari here, what's up?"

"Hello Jen, this is Talia with the Board.
We- The Station has identified an asteroid that- well, it could possibly match the Tempest asteroid that you are looking for."

"Well, shit.
The Board has rejected the White Sky hypothesis, you told everyone that I was a drugged-out widow, going through the usual bullshit of loss.
Why the fuck are you calling me about a possible Tempest?!
Are you starting to believe my crazy bullshit?!"

"Jen, I'm sorry, but there's no need for that kind of language."

"Fuck you, my choice of language isn't up to you," Jen put an end to the whole debate with a glare that reached through the video link and choked Talia.
"Send us the Tempest coordinates, and issue the fucking emergency alert, NOW!"

"No!
That would cause unnecessary panic!"

"Fucking what?!
What's the necessary amount of panic when the planet's about to combust?" Jen asked, rhetorically, and didn't bother leaving Talia any time to respond.
"Don't bullshit an engineer, I know what this colony can - and can't - handle.
Gant has already finished building the bunker silos, and this is exactly the situation that calls for them.
Other villages have reached Stage 4 with the silos, which means they have the bare necessities for a six day evac!
Get the people down into those fucking silos while there's time!"

"Jen, switch to the Gant public channel," Oz said as he listened to a pair of old-fashioned overstuffed headphones.

"Talia, move your ass!", and with that Jen cut the comm-link and switched over to the channel that Oz was on.

The Mayor of Gant, one Leonid Hoist, was speaking from Civic Center, the green and blue flag of the city waving on the mediatron behind him.
"...starting at sunset, this will be Gant's first Emergency Evacuation Drill.
The security teams will be coordinating the exercise, so please follow their directions and make your way to your designated areas of evacuation.
This will be an overnight test of the Emergency Procedures-"

Jen switched off the broadcast and smiled.
"Well shit, the old bastard came through, finally.
Here's hoping the other villages follow suit."

"Aye, whether the Board issues an emergency alert or not, Leo just gave them all an excuse," Oz agreed and smiled.
They'd never been fans of the old Mayor, but once in a while they were happy to see him shake things up.

"Fuck yeah.
Did you check out the Board's Tempest candidate?" Jen switched topics back to the doomsday weapon.

"Ah, it's a good lead, the rock is coming in at the right time, and it's dark, almost invisible.
Makes you wonder what kind of top-secret sensors they've got out in the system.
I'm calling the asteroid Huey, think it might not be the only one."

"Oz, I'm sensing a 'but' on its way, spit it out."

"Ah, not exactly a 'but'...
Remember the Winnie-Sarah-Mary trio we found on the first day?"

"Yeah, sure," Jen replied.
"Winnie will miss us, Mary is way too big, and Sarah is the wrong composition."

"All correct, aye.
But Huey's path is going to intersect with Sarah's path.
In fact, the two asteroids are going to pass within a dozen meters of each other."
Oz pushed a button and the hologram display showed color-coded paths as Sarah and Huey closed distance.

"Fucking hell, there's no way that's a coincidence!" Jen yelped and slapped her hands together.
"Wait, the vision showed the asteroid splitting into seven smaller asteroids.
But what if they were never actually one?"
Jen reached for the controls and Oz shifted over, let her take over.
The view focused on the Sarah asteroid, and aligned things so Sarah appeared to be moving vertically up, and its path was a line straight down, which ended up splitting the rest of the screen in half.
The Huey asteroid swung in from the side and crossed Sarah's path at a 45 degree angle.
"Shit, no way that's a coincidence!"
Jen stood and looked at the simulation, watched first the paths and eventually the asteroids intersect each other, and then it happened again as the hologram restarted.

"Oz, you should head out, it's a long flight to Cheoban," Jen suddenly said.
Oz looked at her with curiosity.
"Sarah may not be the Tempest, but I think she may be the key to all of this bullshit.
I'm going up there to figure this out."

Leaving Heaven for Sarah, Wednesday morning, 35 days to Front, 1 day to White Sky

"Not without me," replied Oz calmly enough.
"You're going to need help up there.
And in case we need to, we can rig one of the shuttles' power sources to go nuclear, take the threat of Tempest out permanently.
You'll want a fast ride out of there, in that case."
Oz finally looked up from the control panel, and stared daggers into Jen's eyes.
"And, not to put too fine a point on it, but Jen, you can't stop me from going up there."

"Well shit, guess I've got a partner one last time," Jen said.
She walked over to the industrial printer in the shuttle and typed at it for a bit, then once the machine whirred to life she began unpacking her shuttle.
She started by moving all of her books, plants, and other mementos to the camping table.
After a short while the shuttle was stripped of all of Jen's personal effects, and the printer had finished its work and unsealed the newly-created timecapsule, a silver-sheened pod.
Jen started to transfer her most sentimental belonging into the timecapsule.

Jen obviously thought that she was coming back to the campsite, and wanted to keep her books and photos safe in case Tempest did go off.
She set a digger up to make a deep hole, then lowered the capsule and buried the whole thing.

Oz followed suit and similarly stripped his shuttle of all non-essential crap, but he just left those bits around the campsite and didn't bother trying to build a capsule.
He used his shuttle very infrequently, so it wasn't full of personal mementos, just a lot of crap that had accumulated over the years, and now Oz was glad to be rid of it.

They blasted off from the campsite while the campfire was still going strong, the twin shuttles rising vertically toward their fateful meeting with Sarah and Huey.
On the way up, as she was squeezed by the acceleration into the control couch, Jen opened a voice chat with Oz and started playing her typical playlist of classic rock.

The trip up to Sarah, 17-14 hours to White Sky

"I was at the Wick Canyon Model, at GU plaza," Oz said and hit a densely-packed bowl of green with a small gentle flame, then inhaled.
"Met a friend of mine from Amel, someone with whom I've drank crappy beers and smoked good ganja, someone who taught me to play virtual fighter games, someone who was a groomsman at my wedding.
And he didn't remember me at all.
We stood together and smoked, blew bubbles, just like old times, and he... he didn't recognize me.
And I thought how sad I would be, if I was in his place, and couldn't remember you.
I hated that thought, hated that it had originated in my mind, and hated the damage it was doing to me, just by being there.
I realized that I missed you, I realized that I loved you.
And I didn't want to live in a world that didn't have you in it."
Oz looked directly into Jen's eyes and blew a plume of ganja smoke into the camera.
"Surprise," he added, his tone laconic and weary.

"Well, shit.
That's incredibly sweet, and also mental," Jen replied, smiling.
"You gotta get out and get laid more often, Oz, if I'm all that's holding you to this plane of existence."

"Yeah, well, here we are.
And, surprise, I'm still happy to be going on this little road-trip of ours."

"Shit, me too, wouldn't want anyone else by my side, as we ride towards armageddon."

The Red Baron and the Green Machine continued to accelerate at a constant half gee as they matched Sarah's orbit, caught up with the asteroid.
Oz and Jen reminisced about the good old days, talked about Helene, and kept an eye on the news services.

Within an hour of Gant's "emergency drill" announcement, the other villages around Misa, even those on the opposite side of the planet, chimed in and announced that they would also be running drills at around the same time that the White Sky was predicted.

The local colonial fleet was routed on a training exercise, which incidentally put it "behind" the planet at the time of White Sky.

The Misa Orbital Station was the only other important object on the radar, and over the course of a few hours she swung in an ever-changing orbit whose purpose was to place the station "behind" the planet at the time of the White Sky.
The Station was being prepared for a hypothetical armageddon, even as its Board continued to deny the whole thing.
All other orbital and atmospheric traffic had ceased, of course, once the entire population of the planet descended into the emergency bunkers.

After a few hours, with armageddon so close on the horizon, the asteroid nicknamed Sarah finally came into view.
Sarah was iron and ice, an old comet core possibly.
She had a strange composition, but otherwise she fit the bill for Tempest.

The shuttles approached the comet remnants from the "back", from "behind", away from the planet and up to a higher orbit.
They rose up and inched closer to the icy core, when the electronics cut out and complete darkness swallowed them up.

Dark void, 14 hours to White Sky

"Shit shit shit shit shit..." Jen mumbled as she busied herself with restarting the ship and figuring out what the hell just happened.

Then the darkness was pierced by bright blue light flooding into the ship from the outside.
Jen looked outside and saw structure, long metal beams crossing dozens of other long metal beams, blue lights all around to flood the space and chase away any possible shadows.

They were approaching what was, just seconds ago, a comet core, but what was now a skyscraper of scaffolding, lights, moving mechanical arms, and miles and miles of pipes and wires.

The Red Baron rebooted and after a few seconds Ship came back online.

Jen, we have just passed through an EM distortion field, something that humanity has only hypothesized about. If we are able to leave this place and transmit our findings, this may be the beginning of a new branch of science we didn't even know existed. No pressure.

"Thanks a lot, shit-kicker, great to know that there's even more at stake here.
Can you get Oz on comm?"

"Ah, hey Jen!
Did your ship also tell you about the EM distortion field?"

"Yeah, yeah, who gives a shit about that.
What are we gonna do now?
With this fucking Tempest?"

Both Jen and Oz looked out at Tempest and pondered wild, out of this world questions and applications that the name suggested and represented.
They now faced an alien weapons system, mere hours away from its expected deployment, ready to unleash armageddon upon the planet below.
And they were inside a cloaking field, which cut off all communications: the ship reported no connection to the system-wide network, and all the light from the outside was blocked.
For Jen and Oz, the universe currently consisted of the Tempest, each other's ships, and darkness.

Oz leaned away from his camera and vomited.

"Oz, get out of the distortion field and scream your head off, get MOSS to issue a system-wide emergency...
I'm going inside of that fucking base, I'm going to find its heart, and I'm gonna tear it out, in the next twelve hours.
And if I'm not out by then, you get them to fire everything they've got at this damn base.
Everything."

"Ah, great plan, Jen, but I don't think we have much say here.
My thrusters are... unresponsive... and there's a force pulling me towards the Tempest."

As Jen heard those words, she realized that the strange stomach-sinking she was feeling for the past little while was actually the tractor beam that Tempest was using on them.
The ships slowly approached the closest end of the Tempest, and a concealed door irised open to admit them into an empty and well-lit docking bay.
As they passed the boundary of the door, the sound inside Jen's shuttle shifted, strangely, and Ship reported a breathable atmosphere outside.
The tractor beam controlled the shuttles and brought them down onto the dull metallic surface of the docking bay, quietly and gently, without a scratch or a bump.

Inside Tempest, 13 hours to White Sky

We are experiencing artificial gravity, the Tempest used a tractor beam on us, the doorway is using some sort of force fields to keep the atmosphere inside. Add another few of new discoveries to take home.

"Ship, fuck you, and shut the fuck up.
Don't tell me that stuff, unless it can help us somehow."
Jen double-checked her helmet seal and opened the airlock's door.

The docking bay was large, well-lit, and empty, save for the two small shuttles.
The airlock on the Green Machine opened and Oz leaned out.

"One small step for a man," Oz declared before he stepped out into the docking bay.

"Good job not fucking it up," Jen said and walked over.
"What now?
Do you see a way out?"

"Ah, I'm sure one will open up, these folks seem to favor surprises," Oz shrugged.

Jen walked over to the closest wall, towards a dark circular spot in what seemed like titanium, which irised open automatically to reveal a bright hallway.
Jen looked over at Oz, who had walked over to the closest corner of the docking bay.
Oz kneeled down and was observing something with his flashlight.
Jen walked away from the wall and the door irised closed, silently.

"Oy, Oz, what did you find?"

"Ah, well... you're not gonna believe this," Oz said and moved out of the way.
The light from his lamp shone onto a dull, broken spear, partially covered in dried blood.

"Well, shit.
Ship, are you seeing this too?"

Yes, Jen, I am.
As Ship responded, half a dozen spider drones dropped out of it and scurried over to the spear.
Please continue, I'll take care of analyzing this.

"Shit, this is getting weirder and weirder," Jen scowled, then in a lower tone of voice she said into her comm clip: "Give me a dozen spiders, start manufacturing them if need be, get them crawling all over this thing, we need to know what we're walking into."

Oz was in the lead so Jen rushed to follow him.
The hallway was lined with sealed doors and lead to another set of auto doors, which lead to a small room.
The small room had an infinite ceiling, which Oz was looking up into from the edge of the room.

"Shit, an elevator?" Jen guessed as she leaned over.
"Looks like it runs the entire length of the Tempest."

I am starting to learn about the Tempest, Ship said and stopped abruptly.
This is the landing bay, and the main control room is at the other end of the Tempest. You can get there by using this elevator.

"Oz, I still think one of us needs to fly out of here, alert the station, get the fleet here in a hurry."

Negative, Jen. The station's lock-down protocol is in effect: incoming vehicles end up in the landing bay, no one leaves without station commander's express permission. The tractor beam will prevent the ships from leaving the bay.

"Ah, they're pretty intent on keeping this base secret," Oz nodded and walked into the room with the infinite ceiling.
Jen followed quickly, wary of the doors closing on her.

The doors closed and down began to move.
But it was just the station moving around, as the elevator stood still.
After a moment the disorienting motion stopped.

"Ah, it's a subway now," Oz said, and the small room sped off "forward" in the direction that was recently "up".

From one orientation, the Tempest was a skyscraper of trusses and struts, with a large open cavity reaching from one end to the other: anything dropped at the "top", would fall through to the "bottom".
From a different orientation, the Tempest was a mile-long factory line of metal pipes and robotic arms.
The elevator car moved from one end of the Tempest towards the other end, and Jen marveled at the structure around them.

Jen stared at the great monstrosity and asked her comm clip: "You recording this?"

Never stopped.

Jen thought that maybe she saw motion in the deep shadows of the space station, and chose to believe that it was Ship's numerous spiders covering them.

Subway pod, 12 hours to White Sky

"Ah, Jen, take a look at this control panel," Oz said.
He was studying the elevator/subway car while Jen marvelled at the megastructure all around them.
Jen turned towards the door and was greeted with a strangely eclectic panel.

The base's native user interface consisted of nested green circles, each with a text label in some alien script.
But on top of this, on top of the digital panel and then the wall, someone had scrawled mazes of blood.

"What the fuck, this is fucked up!" Jen screamed and backed away from the panel.

Jen, calm down, the red writing is just a translation of the underlying alien script into Linear A, an ancient Earth language. The short line means 'head', where the pod is going, and the long line means 'seaport', where you are coming from. You are moving to the control center, that is all.

"Ship, this is really getting tedious," Jen growled.
"That last sentence, that last bit, that's what I need, right here, right now.
We're going to the control center, fucking thanks!"

"Ah, Jen, aren't you at all interested in this?
We're in an alien doomsday device, and there's evidence of ancient humans here!"
Oz pointed out, smiling.

"The first part, Oz, the first fucking part about this being a damn doomsday weapon!
That's how I'm able to delegate and compartmentalize, while you and Ship are off on a fucking field trip!
Shut down the fucking Tempest, then you can geek the fuck out!"

"'How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?'"
Oz nodded.
"Let's go stop doomsday!"

"Fucking A!"

The pod reached the control center, the door irised open, and Jen stared at a slightly curved hull of a long, narrow wooden ship.

The ship, inside the Tempest control center, The Red Room, 12 hours to White Sky

Museum piece in the lobby, keep moving straight, then a left into the red control room.

"Fucking thank you," Jen mumbled and sprang through the large circular rotunda, the key feature of which was an ancient ship, its lone sail tattered but still clearly red, with depictions of bulls and waves.
The ship hovered a few feet off the ground, but this was the least interesting aspect of the whole thing.

Oz followed Jen, then yelped in surprise as a couple of spider bots jumped up onto the wooden ship and skittered around its ancient surface.

Jen turned left and entered the red room: the control center for the entire Tempest.

Some of the panels here were adorned with maze-like writing, done in blood or with a white paint - Jen decided she didn't really need to know how ancient humans made white paint aboard an alien doomsday weapon - and these fascinated Jen, just as they fascinated those ancient pre-Greeks.

"Ship, get a body up here, fucking talk to me!" Jen growled into her comm clip, and instantly a trio of spiders leapt up and formed a clearly feminine form in front of Jen.

Reporting for duty. The Tempest Control center has been damaged, Spider-Ship said and waved to the bloody double-headed axe that was buried in one of the panels.
But I am trying to- I'm working on it, ma-am, Spider-Ship quieted down.

"What do we know?" Jen asked.

Spider-Ship walked up to a blue-ringed device and caused a hologram of the star system to pop up.
The Tempest was marked with a green letter that looked like ϕ.
A red blinking cursor was approaching, the alien distances and times - written in glaring green - were trending downward, towards zero: the ammunition approaching the doomsday machine.

The Tempest is temporarily orbiting Misa, and it flies over the Wick Canyon every 90 minutes. The Tempest will be in this orientation for the next thirty three hours: twelve hours until the first White Sky asteroid, then fourteen revolutions to drop more asteroids.
Spider-Ship paused for a moment, gave Oz and Jen a bit of time to process the news.
The incoming asteroid nicknamed Huey is arriving in about ten hours. The Tempest is expecting it, and will commence a procedure described as 'Fractalization', which will prepare the asteroid to separate into a White Sky event. This Fractalization process takes ninety minutes, or a whole period of the Tempest's rotation. So the Tempest picks up the asteroid on one rotation, and drops it into the sky on the next flyby.

"Well, damn.
How are you so certain abut the number fourteen here?"

The Spider-Ship pointed to multiple red dots farther away from the planet.
The Tempest has helped us find more ammunition asteroids, and there are at least fourteen on the way, fourteen that the Tempest is expecting. The Tempest is going to Fractalize the asteroids one after another and drop them on the planet. This will destroy the Wick Canyon and many human settlements on this side of the planet.

"Damn good summary," Jen replied and applauded.
"Sounds like you're able to talk to their base?"

In short: yes.

"Fucking perfect.
Shut down the Fractalization process, turn off the EM distortion field, and let's contact the Board."

I am unable to do that, Jen: so far I only have read-only access to some of the Tempest systems.

"Fucking lead with that next time!"

What now?, 11 hours to White Sky

"Fuck fuck fuck," Jen muttered as she paced around the control room.
She popped off her helmet, grabbed a stretch of jerky out of a pocket of her suit, and bit into the dried meat.
"OK, Ship, take your time: what the fuck are our options?"

The Nuclear Option is our best bet: detonate Oz's Green Machine to destroy the Tempest.

"That's going to allow us to get away?"

Unknown, but unlikely. This started as a suicide mission, and it may still end up being one.

"Amazing, Ship, just amazing.
You keep on making me angrier and angrier.
How about we detonate you instead of Oz's Green Machine?"

That would also work!

"Fucking wonderful, let's blow you up!
Oz, let's get back to the docking bay and make this happen!"

Jen, something strange is happening in the docking bay.

The mycena, 11 hours to White Sky

"Shit, ship, are you in immediate danger?
Can some of your spiders handle it?"

Uh, well...
Spider-Ship walked over to the projector and the hologram changed to a view inside the docking bay.

One corner of the docking bay was taken over by a mycena infestation: the mushrooms covered every surface and grew literally before Jen's eyes.
The mycenas could be using the station's power system for energy, which may be the first time-

"Ship, does Tempest have any base defenses?
Can we kill the atmosphere, try and blow these bastards out into space?"

Negatory, Jen. The main defense is isolation, by way of the elevator/subway car, but it has been overridden--
The line went dead, and even Ship's fake breathing and background noises ceased.

Jen felt the elevator detach from their portion of the station and move towards the docking bay.

Jen, prepare yourself.

In the hologram, a mass tore itself out of the entwined forest of mycenas, slowly and tenderly, walked away from the wall and shook itself, deliberately, forcing its scales to separate from the now-unnecessary connective tissue which birthed them.
It was a Wick Canyon "deer", the large ancient with coral-like antlers and a bright-red splotch of carapace on his chest, the one that delivered the mycena to Jen in the first place.

Jen watched, mesmerized.

"Ship, how is the mycena controlling the Tempest?" Oz asked.
"Can you use the same hack?"

Negative, Oz. I'm able to monitor the local radio traffic, and the mycena is talking directly to the station. It is NOT hacking, it is AUTHORIZED.

"Oh hell, are you telling me these mushrooms have been around for five thousand years and still remember ancient login details?"

Not inconceivable, given everything we've observed. But that's something that can wait at least a few moments.

Jen nodded and watched the subway car arrive at the far side of the complex.

In the hologram, the Deer walked out of the landing bay and got into the subway car.
The doors closed and the car took off, back towards Jen and Oz.

"Shit shit shit.
Oz, what do you think?"

"Ah, the mycena must have gotten onto one of our ships, and then we brought it up here.
It spread in the landing bay, is talking with the Tempest."
Oz stopped and looked at the elevator/subway car that approached them.
"The mycena managed to take control of the station, somehow.
Maybe we can convince it to shut down the... Fractalization process?"

"Worth a shot," Jen said and unslung her rifle.

The Deer, 11 hours to White Sky

Jen walked out of the red control room and back toward the lobby, past the ancient ship from Earth, and stopped in front of the elevator doors.
She set down a pop-up shield and settled in behind it.
She brought up her rifle, increased the weapon spread, and waited.
Through the many windows of the Tempest she watched as the elevator approached, the deer's red chest a constant presence.

There was something off about the deer's face.
In fact, it had a face.
The wooden face that Jen interacted with, a lifetime ago, down in the Canyon.

The pod docked, the doors opened, and the deer walked out of the elevator and out into the large lobby with the wooden ship.
The wooden mask maintained constant eye contact with Jen, and the body moved slowly in her direction.

"That's far enough," Jen called out and the Deer stopped.
"What do you want?"

The mask tilted, shifted, and curiosity spilled out and filled the lobby.

"I'm going to stop Tempest, prevent the White Sky," Jen spoke through clenched teeth and tried to convey this emotionally.

The mask shifted and Jen instantly knew that the Deer was there to stop them.
The Deer very much needed the White Sky to happen.

Jen fired, again and again, and batch after batch of supersonic flechettes raced for the Deer, tore through the mask to reveal dead splintered wood, and bounced off the Deer's scales.
Ship will probably say that the scales are obviously engineered, and didn't evolve here, Jen thought to herself.
She looked down the length of the rifle, centered it on the Deer's heart, switched to propelled fractal ammo, and fired.

The round ignited a dozen rockets and launched an ounce of mathematically-packed carbon through the hardened red scales of the Deer.
The bullet then buried itself deep into the purple meat of the beast.
The Deer slammed against the back wall of the elevator and practically exploded.
Rock-hard scales impaled themselves into the walls, thankfully bounced off the windows, and a few even embedded themselves into the ancient Minoan ship.

Jen rose from behind the pop-up shield, checked on Oz in the next room and saw that he was unharmed, then she finally turned her eyes toward the Deer.

The Deer was lying against the wall, in front of the subway car, its features exploded out from the center like some fleshy flower, spread out for all the world to see.
The Deer bled out a purple carpet around itself, and this liquid began to churn away and eat the flesh that it just powered.

"Well shit, it's one of those bleeds-acid fuckers!"

Doesn't look like it's making any progress on the floor, Spider-Ship put in as she walked closer to the Deer-mess.
It doesn't pose a threat at the present, looks like it's liquidating the dead body, probably-.

"Wonderful, fine.
Now, big question: why the fuck does that thing want the White Sky!?"

"It obviously doesn't understand the consequences," Oz mumbled.

Hard disagree, Oz, Spider-Ship piped in.
Deer obviously understood the consequences, It has shown that reality to Jen, time and time again. And Oz, you've seen that destructive future as well. It seems likely that the Tempest performs its job on a set schedule, and Deer was distressed by your attempts to interfere.

"Ah, well, when you put it that way," Oz demurred.

Jen looked in on the Deer.
The purple carpet churned through part of the Deer's corpse, dissolved it into more of itself.
Out of the older regions of the purple carpet, where the liquid originally splashed down, mycena plants rose and glistened.

"Fuck, I think this is about to get worse.
This looks just like that mycena nest from the landing bay.
I'm sealing the elevator, think we're stuck here, Oz.
Ship, can we still use the Nuclear Option?"

Affirmative, I am able to detonate my reactor.

Jen turned toward the ancient wooden ship, walked over to it, ran her hand over its weathered surface, admired the red sail and the Earth creatures.
"We're going to lose all of this history, all of these discoveries that we've made about the distortion fields, the artificial gravity.
The Nuclear Option must be our last option, for humanity's sake."

The mycena infestation is spreading through the landing bay, but they haven't yet realized that I'm a threat. We can wait, but as soon as this organism figures out the truth, I'm blowing us all up.

"Hell, that's great.
Now that we have some time," Jen said and turned back toward the wood ship, "what is the story behind this?"

The wooden ship, 11 hours to White Sky

This ship was part of a Minoan fleet.

"What the hell is a Minoan?"

It was a Bronze Age culture from Earth, from around two thousand BC. It was a maritime civilization centered on Crete, a Greek island.

"Well damn.
How did they end up here?"

Abduction: the ship and her crew were picked up from Earth, then dropped off inside the Wick Canyon. It wasn't the first time that happened, but it definitely was the last time. The Minoans surprised the abductors, and were able to get the upper hand on them. Some twelve years after they were brought here, the Minoans left on an alien FTL ship called 'Light Desire'.

"Holy shit, that's...
Bronze Age, they must have thought this was Olympus, the Minotaur's home world, or something..." Jen trailed off and walked around the wooden ship, took in the details.
She suddenly had a desire to explore the wooden relic, maybe find some ancient Earth wine, have a drink to the pre-Greeks who outwitted alien slavers and then set out on a grand voyage across the stars.

"So, ah, who exactly kidnapped them?" Oz asked.

That's impossible to answer. I've been calling them the Abductors, and I get the feeling that the entirety of Wick Canyon and these alien trials of strength were somewhat taboo in the Abductors' culture, so they took a lot of precautions to hide their tracks. Take video surveillance, for example: they have around the clock footage of the Tempest, but you won't find a single image of an Abductor. The cameras were designed to discreetly turn off, then back on. We may never know who created this place.

"Freaking wonderful.
Do we know anything else about the humans?"

Spider-Ship waved an appendage to a detached alien hologram projector, that a different spider dragged into one corner of the lobby.
The projector lit up with an eerie green glow and a scene appeared above it.
Half a dozen warriors in tattered and bloodied uniforms stood around an older fellow who used an oar to support himself, all rendered in shades of green that the Tempest seemed to favor for neutral information.

The older man started to talk, a gruff but song-like voice that favored open vowels and expressive tones, and a speech recorded five thousand years ago made Jen weep.
The words made no sense, but the human expression and emotion spoke volumes on their own.

Partial translation: I am King Arkadamos... high priestess Kerana... Captain Lykastos is currently between ships... trusted archers. We have... eight years within the Infinite Forest... four more aboard Hall... we are ready to leave this hell.

The hologram started over and the gruff song-like voice once again reverberated through the lobby.

There are more recordings. The Minoans decided that the onboard cameras were the eyes of gods, or something along those lines, and spoke their deepest secrets to them. This is an archeologist's dream come true.

"When Arkadamos and his party left, what the hell happened to the Abductors?
Did they kill all of them?"

On the contrary: King Arkadamos kept every single Abductor alive. The Minoans managed to take their opponents without any loss of life, on either side.
Spider-Ship paused and lowered her head.
Arkadamos saw the Abductors' technology, he wept, and cast the Abductors down into the Infinite Forest.

Huey, 90 minutes to White Sky

Huey entered the EM distortion field right on schedule.

The tractor beam pulled it into the far end of the Tempest.
Jen and Oz watched from the control room.

"Oh hell, I was kinda hoping it wouldn't come through," Jen shook her head in mock display of disappointment.
She walked over to the prepared corner of the room and began to put on her harness.
Oz came over and double-checked the improvised winch and clipped the cable to Jen's suit.

The corner of the control room was occupied with a smattering of printer refuse, tools, and a giant hole that took Oz and Jen hours of painstaking drilling to complete.
Spider-Bot walked around double- and triple-checked the equipment and the sensors that they had sent into the hole.

One of the specially-prepped drones used its multitude of legs to slowly and carefully clamber down the hole.

"Maximum effort," Jen mumbled and climbed down, below the level of the station's floor, following the drone.
A second drone followed Jen.

"Keep crawling down, then follow the flare lighting for about ten minutes," Oz spoke through a radio.

"Roger," came Jen's clipped reply.

There was still a lot of uncertainty in their plan, and Oz clearly heard it in Jen's voice.

"Where the hell are the mycenas?" Jen asked, as a diversion.

"The drones are holding them at the half-way point, just as before," Oz replied.

"What about the shuttles?
Oz?"

"They're still not responding."

Silence stretched on, Jen's breathing was the only sound on the line.

After ten nerve-wrecking minutes, Jen came to the end of the crawlspace.
"Fuck, which way now?"

"Hard to explain, Jen, so just look for a blinking orange light."

Jen found herself deep in a forest of pipes and cabling, but as she looked around she saw a faint orange glow coming from below, so she began moving in that direction.
Then gravity disappeared and directions seized to matter.
Jen pushed herself forward, toward the orange glow, and eventually spotted the drone with its flashing light.
The drone was positioned over a patch of absolute darkness.

"The panel is off, it's open space beyond," Oz piped in.

Jen pulled herself toward the window to the outside, then through the opening and out, into the forest of open trusses of the Tempest.
Jen looked towards the far end and saw the asteroid, Huey, as it progressed through the zero-gee assembly line.
She looked almost everywhere else and saw only darkness: the EM distortion field.
Next to her, two specially-prepped drones were latched onto the station.

Jen hooked herself into the Tempest with a set of cables, set a timer for an hour, and fell asleep.

Ya-hoo!, 10 minutes to White Sky

Jen woke up a few minutes before her alarm was scheduled to go off, so she turned it off, and looked around.
She was outside the Tempest, "under" the Control Center, and physically in the way of the Tempest's zero-gee assembly line.
The asteroid Huey moved through the pipeline and was almost out.
At the far side, off in the distance against a pitch-black background of the EM distortion field, Jen saw the incoming asteroid nicknamed Dewey, the second asteroid that the Tempest was going to 'Fractalize' before dropping it on Misa.

Jen did some mental gymnastics, waited for the right moment, unclipped herself from the tether, pushed herself off, and gently "fell" onto Huey, which was passing just four feet away from her.
Two zip-tied drones on Jen's forearms fired small grappling hooks into the asteroid and reeled her to the house-sized pile of rock.

"Forgot my cowboy hat," Jen joked morosely into the radio.
Oz started playing "Ride of the Valkyries", and that was alright.
"Where are the mycenas?"

"Ah, they...
They're getting close."

"Fuck, what's the plan?"

"Ah, well, dead-simple: we've got about ten thousand rounds pointed outward from the hole in the hull, and all those rounds know their jobs.
I'm right behind you, Jen," Oz said as he slipped into the hole in the hull.

As soon as she impacted the mountain of rock, Jen secured herself to the pile, then she started a timer on the datapad that was mounted to the inside of her left arm.
The pad called out how far she had traveled.

At 17.4 kilometers, the datapad crashed and Jen shut her eyes.
After a moment the surprisingly-dark planet Misa appeared below, with the stars scattered all around it.
Jen looked back toward the Tempest, but saw just a small comet core.
The illusion was back in place.

Time was delta-vee, Oz had reminded her, and so Jen first checked on the drone with the thruster: Claudia Jean.

When Ship started producing all of those drones, some twelve hours ago, she decided to let natural selection drive for a bit, so the drones she made were very different, and easily reconfigurable.
Ship decided that variety was important in the face of the unknown, and so Claudia Jean ended up being the tank drone, and the first to be considered for this important role.

Claudia Jean, or CJ as everyone referred to it, was busy using its multiple arms and drills, to extend long winding tentacles into the rock pile, and each of these then extended a veritable tree of tentacles, all under CJ's control.
All with the directive to hold the asteroid together.

The top half of the drone was taken up by a large energy pack, and a plasma thruster that Jen hoped would be enough for this maneuver.
She double-checked the setup and kicked it off as quickly as possible, in between double- and triple-checking her own tethers, as well as the drones'.

The plasma thruster ignited with a kilometer-long streak of blue, and Jen felt the strange sensation of hanging under a mountain.
The acceleration was gentle, perhaps too gentle, but that would have to be.
Jen reached for the second drone, Busfield.

Busfield booted up without issues after they passed through the EM distortion field, and had a smile on its display.
Jen grabbed it, rechecked all of its tethers between the drone and herself, double-checked all the connections yet again, undid Busfield's connections to the asteroid, then started the broadcast.
Busfield showed emoji waves running over its displays: it was transmitting its data payload and her SOS.
Jen undid her own connections to the asteroid mass, as quickly as she could, and suddenly she was no longer falling.

The mountain of gravel drew away from Jen, dove down toward Misa, toward the Wick Canyon.
Jen hoped that their plan worked out, that the asteroid wouldn't break up into a White Sky.
That someone would hear her plight, before she followed the asteroid down to the surface.
Or until Dewey, Louie, or one of their unrelated kin broke up in a White Sky event.

Jen hugged the very talkative drone Busfield, and called the Board.

The board call

"Talia here.
Jen!
We've been looking everywhere for you!"

"I'm in a 90-minute orbit, passing over these coordinates right now," Jen said and sent her location.

"We should be able to track- we see you!
Jen, there are about a dozen different satellites looking at you now."

"Damn wonderful tech, so when are you going to blast Tempest out of the fucking sky?!"

"We can't."

"The fuck?"

"The fleet has been moved to the outer systems, and won't be back in time.
Misa Orbital Science Station is on a wildly-different orbit, we'd need a day just for the delta-vee changes, and even then-
Shit, never mind.
We're scrambling the military assets on the ground, but to coincide with the 'emergency drills', we scheduled maintenance of the whole back fleet...
We're going through civilian channels of course, but they, likewise, scheduled time off or maintenance.
If they're not already in the air, no one is coming to get you in the next couple of hours.
There's no one who can stop all of the upcoming White Skies.
From the data you're sending, we can see that you've attached a thruster to 'Huey', and it should impact the planet shortly.
And we have to assume Osgood is preparing to similarly derail Dewey."

"No, we only had enough fuel to boost Huey, there wasn't enough for Dewey.
This was always a stopgap!
You're supposed to be here, to rain down an ungodly fucking firestorm upon Tempest!"

"Jen, why didn't you detonate your shuttle?" Talia suddenly asked.

"We lost contact with our shuttles, the damn mycena swallowed them both up," Jen shook her head.
"Oz and I gave you an hour and a half, ninety fucking minutes, and you're telling me it's all a fucking waste!
Our lives are just... postponing the apocalypse."

"I'm sorry," Talia said.

Jen's visors beeped and directed her toward Tempest: it was almost five minutes since they separated, and the "comet core camouflage" now disappeared behind the curve of Misa.
The next time Jen could see "Tempest", would be in eighty minutes.

Contact, 90 minutes to Dewey-generated White sky

"Jen Hikari, please respond!" the hailing call came in and shocked Jen to her core.

"Hey, yes, Jen here!
Who the hell is this?"

"A friend.
I believe you-
Your theories."

"Where the hell are you?"

"About six minutes-
Six minutes from your location.
Please hang on."

"Very fucking funny," Jen grumbled.
"I'm not going anywhere.
So we got some time: who the hell are you?"

Jen's goggles projected text on a random portion of the sky, and when zoomed in, they showed an incoming colonial heavy jumper, an ancient design no longer in use.

"Name's Vincent.
I, uh, broke Gant quarantine.
Stole this ship, from the colonial shipyard."

"Well fucking done Vincent, top marks!
Sorry you had to break the law, but so happy to hear you!
So if you know my theories, why the hell are you out here?
The White Sky is supposed to be happening right fucking now!"

"That's why!
I've been following your investigation-
Your and Oz's, of course-
And I believe the evidence, it is clear!
I fear the coming judgement.
After you left, for Tempest, we lost touch with you.
Many said it was a hoax-
Ha, a hoax, from Jen?!
I never believed it-
Never for a moment!"

"Ok, ok, I got it, you're a damn believer!
That's freaking wonderful, Vincent.
You still following Tempest?
Know where it is?"

"Ah, yes ma'am, indeed."

"Good, we're going back there, Oz needs a pickup, and we need to take care of Louie."

Dewey and Oz, and Last Intentions, 5 minutes to Dewey-generated White sky

Tempest came into view as predicted, and spat out another house-sized asteroid, also on schedule.
Oz was strapped to this one, Vincent's highjacked shuttle 'Last Intentions' showed in its control center.

"Welcome to the party, pal!" Jen transmitted.
Oz roared back with laughter and tears.

"I'm so fucking glad to hear your voice," Oz said in between sobs.

"Oz, shut up and jump off the damn asteroid, let's kill Dewey!"

The line was silent for a short while as Oz detached the steel cables from the drones, detached those from himself, then fired his thrusters against the asteroid, and rose above the slowly-falling Dewey.

'Last Intentions' followed the signal and picked Oz up without much fanfare.
The ship then turned her weapons on the Fractalized asteroid and unleashed roughly a third of the ship's energy to vaporize the nearly-vaporized asteroid.

"What about Louie?" Oz asked, the first thing he said after taking off his helmet and breathing in deeply.
"I didn't see it arrive."

"Vincent here managed to blast it out of the damn sky!" Jen beamed.
"Well, after almost blasting us out of the damn sky, but we figured out the controls."

Vincent shrugged and offered Oz a handshake to welcome him aboard.

After which, Oz immediately collapsed into an acceleration couch.
"That it, isn't it?
We've stopped the White Sky, right?"

"Hell yeah we did," Jen answered.
"Just gotta hang out here in orbit for the next day or so, shoot down any of these damn 'ammo asteroids'."

"Aye, and hopefully the fleet will arrive before then, to relieve us," Vincent said, then recalled that he stole the vehicle in the first place, and his face drooped.

"Hey, fuck them if they give you any shit.
If it wasn't for you, Vincent, then we'd all be dead!
So thanks for that."

The Zodiac hits, a patrol, a departure

Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries were the next asteroid nicknames, and they were all basically the same mountains of gravel as the first trio.
While they blasted the mountains to bits, the crew of 'Last Intentions' debated if the asteroids were 'found' or 'created', then drank copious amounts of vodka (Vincent had never heard of Europan whisky), and caught up with family and friends around Misa.

The colonial fleet showed up in time to shoot down Taurus.

The fleet launched a small patrol to secure 'Last Intentions' and her crew.
Before the patrol arrived, two spacesuits were ejected out of the airlock, then the stolen ship took off toward Tempest.

The patrol picked up two very drunk individuals: Osmond "Oz" Fielding and Vincent "Vince" Janney, who were entirely happy to cooperate with whatever investigation the marines were after, but were in no condition to cooperate at all.

Jenny "Jen" Hikari piloted the stolen ship that approached the comet core fragment known as Tempest, and then she suddenly disappeared.

Back to Tempest

The ship shut down, on schedule, and Jen was ready for it.
She rebooted every important electronic as soon as they were past the distortion field.
The Tempest glowed blue, just as it had the first time she saw it.

The tractor beam pulled her toward the docking bay.
From this distance, it was hard to tell what had happened inside, except that every window was covered by a dark web.
The landing bay door irised open and darkness awaited.

Jen upped her already-potent med schedule by a degree and waited for the ship to touch down.
When it did, she walked out, unarmed, without a helmet.

The landing bay hosted a whole new universe.
Mycenas and their multi-colored cousins filled the entire space, had marched past and through Jen's Red Baron and Oz's Green Machine.
Dark liquids dripped out of both ships.

A bright green clump of mushrooms illuminated the space, and there Jen noticed the red-chested Deer.

She walked toward the Deer, who was sitting on the ground in an impossible posture for an Earth deer, and took a proffered knit pad that looked exactly like one Helene got them for camping.

"Well, shit, guess you're still you," Jen said as she observed the torn-up shell of the Deer.

The deer nodded its head toward a small mycena plant that had just sprouted in front of Jen.
She reached a finger, swiped some sap, and licked it.

The last trip

The sap came in with death and destruction, millions dying by a thousand artificial suns.
Jen threw the rendering Ship had made, plus the personal work she had done to take down Huey.

The Deer pushed back against the changes, but Jen pushed more.
She tossed in her sorrow for Helene, the loss of her mourning, the loss of Oz for an hour and a half, the abandonment of her friends for this mission to Tempest.

The Deer looked on and thought.
It pondered and tried to see the future, but failed, time and time again.

Jen extended her hand and touched the deer on the chest, softly, gently, reassuringly.
It's alright, I'll be with you, Jen thought and the Deer felt it.

Jen opened her eyes and looked out onto death.
The landing bay was filled with wilting and dried out plants, the frail curlicues that cracked and crumbled under their own weight.
It took just a minute for the purple mycena carpet to fall away from the walls and windows.

The fucking windows!, Jen's mind provided, but the rest of her body was still woozy from the sap.

The fucking windows showed a night-time orbital view of Misa, and the Wick Canyon just below them.
The Deer turned off the EM distortion field, and finally Tempest could finally be seen, and it could similarly see the planet below.

Jen stared, because she felt an unease, a surprise of sorts.
But what was it?

She looked at the picturesque scene unfolding before her, and pondered: what is missing?

And then she saw, instantly: the Front was gone!
The constant fire that burned bright enough to be seen from space, it was out.
For the first time in possibly millions of years?

Next

Back at the campsite nicknamed Heaven, more than a dozen shuttles stood a ways up river, out of the way of the main event.

Jen walked into the river, carrying a bronze urn.
She turned and faced the shore.

"Welcome, all.
Helene would have loved to have seen this turn out.
She was my light, my love, and I miss her dearly.
But life must go on, and it does, without apologizing, and we must go along.
And I'm happy to say, I'm going along."

Jen turned back, spoke a private prayer to Helene, and released the ashes.

She walked back, crying but smiling, into the arms of friends.
They toasted with Europan whisky, and Jen smiled as her friends each had to hold themselves back from retching.
"It's an acquired taste," Jen said and took another sip.

After a while, when the crowd had binged on Helene's favorite sandwiches and kebabs, and listened to a couple of albums of old rock, Jen caught everyone's attention again.

"Thank you all for coming today for Helene's memorial.
We are also, like many others around the planet, celebrating the end of an era: the Front has stopped burning, so we are now no longer in the Wick Canyon.
Finally, today is a celebration of birth, as today marks the first day of the newest settlement on Misa: Helenesburg, the first village established within the Infinite Forest."

The End