The supply ship was eleven days late when Pryce stopped pretending it was coming.
She’d kept up the pretense longer than the others—checking the tracking system every morning, running diagnostics on the comm array, filing reports that no one was reading. The routines of someone who still believed the routines meant something. But on the eleventh day, she woke up and didn’t check. She lay in her bunk and stared at the ceiling and listened to the recyclers wheeze and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that they had been forgotten.
The outpost was called Bravo-7. It sat on a rock designated KV-447, which was itself orbiting a larger rock that was orbiting a brown dwarf that wasn’t quite a star. The astronomical designation ran to thirty-two characters. Nobody used it. Nobody needed to. The only people who cared about KV-447 were the seven people living on it, and even they had stopped caring months ago.
There were six recruits and one officer. Plus service personnel—Yun in the kitchen and Baxter on maintenance—but they didn’t count, officially. They weren’t military. They were contractors, hired by a company that had been bought by another company that had been absorbed into something larger, and somewhere in that chain of acquisitions their contracts had become administrative ghosts, obligations that existed on paper but that no one was responsible for fulfilling.
Pryce was the officer. Lieutenant, technically, though the rank meant nothing out here. She’d been assigned to Bravo-7 eighteen months ago, a posting that was supposed to last six. The replacement orders kept getting delayed. The replacement orders had stopped coming entirely, four months back, and now the supply ship was eleven days late and the tracking system showed nothing, not even an expected arrival window, just a blank field where a date should have been.
She got up. She put on her uniform, which was fraying at the cuffs because there were no replacements and the fabricator had stopped working properly eight months ago. She walked to the mess hall, where Yun was serving breakfast to the recruits who’d bothered to show up.
Three of them. Okafor, Santos, and the new one—Lund, who wasn’t really new anymore but who still seemed startled every time someone addressed her directly. The other three were absent. Reese was probably still asleep. Vogler and Pearson were probably together, which was against regulations, but Pryce had stopped enforcing regulations that didn’t affect operational readiness, and since there were no operations to be ready for, that meant she’d stopped enforcing most of them.
“Lieutenant.” Okafor nodded as she sat down. He was the oldest of the recruits, twenty-four, which made him practically ancient in this cohort. He’d been destined for something better before a disciplinary issue had redirected him here. He never talked about what he’d done, and Pryce had learned not to ask.
“Okafor. Santos. Lund.” She accepted the tray Yun slid toward her—reconstituted protein, hydrated vegetables, something that was technically bread. The same meal they’d been eating for weeks. The variety packs had run out a month ago.
“Supply ship?” Santos asked. The question had become a ritual, asked without hope, answered without information.
“Nothing yet.”
Santos nodded and went back to his food. He was nineteen, the youngest, with a face that still held the softness of adolescence and eyes that had already gone hard. He’d volunteered for this posting. Pryce had never understood why anyone would volunteer for Bravo-7, but the military was full of people making choices that didn’t make sense from the outside.
Lund didn’t say anything. She rarely did. She ate with mechanical efficiency, eyes fixed on her tray, body angled away from the others as if she was trying to make herself smaller. She’d arrived on the last supply ship, three months ago, replacing a recruit named Harmon who’d had a breakdown and been shipped back to somewhere with better psychiatric facilities. Pryce sometimes wondered if Lund was heading for the same destination. The signs were there, if you knew how to read them.
“I need to talk to you,” Yun said, appearing at Pryce’s elbow. “After breakfast.”
“About?”
“Inventory.”
Pryce nodded. Inventory was Yun’s way of saying we have a problem, which was Yun’s way of saying we have another problem, which was becoming the baseline state of life on Bravo-7. She finished her breakfast without tasting it and followed Yun back to the kitchen.
The kitchen was small, efficient, designed to feed up to thirty people from a footprint barely larger than a closet. With only nine mouths to feed, it should have been more than adequate. But adequacy assumed supplies. Adequacy assumed the system working the way it was supposed to work.
“Water recycler’s down to sixty percent efficiency,” Yun said. She was fifty-three, gray-haired, with the weathered look of someone who’d spent decades working jobs that no one else wanted. She’d been at Bravo-7 longer than anyone—four years, through three different crews. She knew things about the outpost that weren’t in any manual. “I’ve been compensating, but we’re going to hit a wall soon. Two weeks, maybe three.”
“Baxter can’t fix it?”
“Baxter’s been trying to fix it for six months. The parts we need aren’t in inventory. They were supposed to come on the supply ship.”
The supply ship. Everything came back to the supply ship. The ship that was eleven days late. The ship that showed no arrival window on the tracking system. The ship that Pryce was beginning to suspect had never been dispatched at all.
“How bad?”
“Bad.” Yun pulled up a display on her tablet, columns of numbers that Pryce didn’t fully understand but that painted a clear enough picture. “We can cut rations, stretch what we have. But the water’s the problem. The recycler fails completely, we’ve got maybe five days of reserves. After that...” She shrugged. “After that, we start dying.”
“There has to be something. Emergency protocols. Backup systems.”
“There’s a backup recycler in storage. It’s thirty years old and hasn’t been serviced since before I got here. Baxter’s looking at it, but he’s not optimistic.”
Pryce stared at the numbers. Five days. Five days of water, if the recycler failed completely. Two weeks if it kept limping along at current efficiency. Three weeks if they cut rations to the bone and stopped all non-essential usage.
Three weeks. And the supply ship was already eleven days late, with no explanation, no communication, no sign that anyone in the chain of command even remembered they existed.
“Don’t tell the others,” she said. “Not yet. Let me figure out what our options are.”
Yun’s expression suggested she knew exactly what their options were, and that she wasn’t impressed by Pryce’s desire to pretend otherwise. But she nodded and turned back to her work, and Pryce went to find Baxter.
Baxter was in the maintenance bay, surrounded by the guts of the backup recycler. He was sixty-one, bald, with the thick-fingered hands of someone who’d spent his life taking things apart and putting them back together. He’d been a shipyard worker before the yards automated. He’d been a lot of things before they automated. Now he was here, on a rock in the middle of nowhere, trying to resurrect a machine that had been obsolete when he was born.
“It’s fucked,” he said, by way of greeting. “The seals are gone. The membranes are crystallized. The pump assembly looks like someone used it for target practice.” He wiped his hands on a rag that was already black with grease. “I can maybe get it running, but it won’t hold. A week, tops. Then it fails worse than the primary.”
“A week is better than nothing.”
“A week is delaying the inevitable.” Baxter sat back on his heels and looked at her. His eyes were tired—not the tiredness of a long shift, but the deeper exhaustion of someone who’d been fighting losing battles for too long. “You know what this place is, Lieutenant? This place is where they send things they don’t want anymore. Equipment. People. Problems. They stick us out here and forget about us, and then they act surprised when we stop working.”
“The supply ship—”
“Isn’t coming. You know it. I know it. Yun knows it. The only ones who don’t know it are those kids out there, and they’ll figure it out soon enough.” He stood, joints cracking, and tossed the rag onto his workbench. “I’ll do what I can with the recycler. But you need to start thinking about what happens when ‘what I can’ isn’t enough.”
Pryce wanted to argue. Wanted to insist that the system would work, that help would come, that their situation was temporary and manageable and not the slow-motion disaster that Baxter was describing. But she’d been an officer long enough to know the difference between optimism and denial.
“Do what you can,” she said. “I’ll handle the rest.”
Baxter snorted. It wasn’t quite a laugh. “Sure you will.”
The outpost had been built forty years ago, during a period of expansion that had long since contracted. It was designed to house thirty people in reasonable comfort, which meant it could house nine people in echoing emptiness. Corridors that should have been busy were silent. Common areas that should have been crowded were vacant. The whole place felt like a body that had lost too much weight, skin hanging loose over bones that had never been meant to show.
Pryce walked the corridors because walking was better than sitting in her quarters, staring at a comm system that had nothing to report. She walked past the rec room, where Santos was playing a game against an AI opponent because there was no one else to play against. She walked past the observation deck, where the viewport showed nothing but stars and the distant bulk of the brown dwarf that wasn’t quite a star.
She found Vogler and Pearson in one of the storage bays. They were sitting together on a crate of equipment that hadn’t been opened in years, talking in low voices that stopped when she appeared.
“Lieutenant.” Vogler was the handsome one—dark hair, bright eyes, the kind of face that made people want to trust him. Pearson was quieter, watchful, with a stillness about her that could read as calm or as something waiting to happen. They’d been together for three months. It was against regulations. Pryce didn’t care.
“The storage bay isn’t a social area.”
“Neither is anywhere else.” Vogler’s smile was charming and empty. “We’re just talking.”
“Talk somewhere else.”
They left, moving with the unhurried pace of people who had nowhere to go and no reason to get there quickly. Pryce watched them disappear around the corner and wondered what they’d been talking about. Wondered if it mattered.
The storage bay was full of equipment they didn’t need for situations that would never arise. Emergency spacesuits for evacuations that would never happen. Medical supplies for injuries that had never occurred. Weapons for threats that had never materialized. All of it carefully inventoried, carefully maintained, carefully useless.
She found the survival kit in the back—the last-resort kit, the one you were supposed to use when everything else had failed. It contained water purification tablets, concentrated rations, thermal blankets, and a beacon. The beacon would broadcast a distress signal for up to six months on a single charge.
She turned it over in her hands, feeling the weight of it. Six months of crying for help into a void that might or might not be listening. Six months of hoping someone would hear. Six months of slowly starving while you waited to find out.
She put the beacon back in the kit. The kit back on the shelf. The shelf back in the darkness.
Not yet. Not yet.
Reese finally emerged at dinner, looking like he hadn’t slept despite spending most of the day in his quarters. He was twenty-two, blond, with the kind of athletic build that suggested he’d been good at sports before the military had given him other things to be good at. He’d been at Bravo-7 for fourteen months, longer than any of the other recruits, and something in that time had broken him.
Not visibly. Not in ways you could point to and name. But Pryce had seen the way he looked at things—at people, at the walls, at his own hands—as if he was trying to see through them to something else. She’d seen the way he flinched at sounds that shouldn’t have been startling. She’d read his file, the parts of it that weren’t redacted, and she could guess at what the redactions hid.
“Reese.” She sat across from him at the mess table. Yun’s dinner was the same as Yun’s breakfast—protein, vegetables, bread. The repetition was starting to feel like a kind of punishment. “Haven’t seen you in a few days.”
“Been busy.”
“Busy with what?”
He looked at her, and for a moment something flickered in his eyes—irritation, maybe, or something darker. “Personal projects.”
“What kind of personal projects require three days in your quarters?”
“The kind that are personal.”
The table was too small for confrontation, but Pryce leaned forward anyway. “I’m responsible for everyone on this outpost. That includes you. If there’s something wrong—”
“There’s nothing wrong.” His voice was flat, toneless. “I just needed some time alone. Is that against regulations too?”
It wasn’t. Pryce had stopped enforcing the regulations about mandatory socialization six months ago, when it became clear that mandatory socialization was making everyone miserable without actually improving morale. She’d told herself it was a pragmatic decision. She’d told herself that isolation wasn’t the same as deterioration.
Looking at Reese now, she wasn’t sure she believed that anymore.
“The supply ship is late,” she said. “Eleven days late. I thought you should know.”
“I know.”
“You checked the tracking system?”
“No. I just know.” He pushed his food around his plate without eating it. “Things don’t come here, Lieutenant. Things don’t leave here. This place is a dead end. A pit they throw things into when they want them to disappear.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s true. You know it’s true. You’ve been here long enough to know.” He looked up at her again, and this time the something in his eyes was clearer—not anger, not despair, but a kind of terrible certainty. “We’re not going home. None of us. This is where we stay until we stop staying anywhere.”
He stood up, leaving his tray untouched, and walked out of the mess hall. The other recruits watched him go. Santos looked worried. Lund looked blank. Okafor looked like he was thinking about something he didn’t want to think about.
“He’s getting worse,” Yun said, from behind the serving counter. “I’ve seen it before. With Harmon. With the others.”
“How does it end?”
Yun didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
Night on Bravo-7 was a convention rather than a reality. The lights dimmed at 2200, brightened at 0600, and in between the outpost pretended to sleep while its inhabitants lay awake and listened to the sounds of machines keeping them alive.
Pryce lay in her bunk and stared at the ceiling and thought about water.
Sixty percent efficiency. Maybe two weeks if they rationed carefully. Maybe three if they stopped bathing, stopped cleaning, stopped doing anything that wasted the precious molecules that the recycler was struggling to reclaim.
She’d joined the military at nineteen, full of the usual reasons—escape from a life that was going nowhere, benefits that would let her build something better, a uniform that made her feel like she mattered. Twenty-three years later, she wasn’t sure any of those reasons had been good ones. The escape had become its own trap. The benefits had accumulated into a pension she might never collect. The uniform was fraying at the cuffs, and the feeling of mattering had worn away sometime around her third posting to a place no one cared about.
Bravo-7 wasn’t her first forgotten outpost. There had been others—monitoring stations on dead moons, relay points on the edge of systems that had been explored and abandoned, places where the military maintained a presence because maintaining a presence was what militaries did. She’d spent her career in these places, slowly realizing that the promotions weren’t coming, that the interesting assignments were going to people who had connections she didn’t have, that she was being shunted into the bureaucratic equivalent of storage.
The posting to Bravo-7 had come with a promise: one year, and then a transfer to something better. That had been eighteen months ago. The transfer orders never came. The year became fourteen months, then sixteen, then eighteen, and somewhere along the way she’d stopped expecting anything to change.
She’d filed another report that evening. Status update, supply request, request for communication from command. The same report she’d filed every week for months. The same report that had never received a response.
She’d checked the tracking system one more time before lights-out. The supply ship field was still blank. No expected arrival. No estimated transit time. Just empty space where information should have been.
The comm system was working. She’d tested it herself, bounced signals off the relay satellite that was supposed to connect them to the rest of humanity. The signals went out. Nothing came back.
Someone, somewhere, was receiving her reports. Someone, somewhere, was choosing not to respond. That was somehow worse than pure silence would have been—the knowledge that they were being heard and ignored, that their situation was known and dismissed.
She thought about Baxter’s words. This place is where they send things they don’t want anymore. She thought about the recruits—young people who’d ended up here through some combination of bad luck and bad choices, people who were supposed to be learning skills and building careers but were instead learning how to wait and building nothing at all.
She thought about Reese. We’re not going home. None of us.
In the darkness, with the recyclers wheezing and the walls humming and the void pressing in on all sides, it was hard to argue with him.
Pryce couldn’t sleep. She’d tried for two hours, lying in the dark, listening to the outpost’s mechanical heartbeat, and finally she gave up and went to the observation deck.
Lund was there.
The younger woman was sitting on the bench, her knees drawn up to her chest, staring through the viewport at the brown dwarf. She didn’t turn when Pryce entered, didn’t acknowledge her presence at all.
“Can’t sleep?” Pryce asked.
No response.
“Lund. Can’t sleep?”
“I don’t sleep.” Lund’s voice was flat, affectless. “Not really. I close my eyes and wait until it’s time to open them again.”
Pryce sat on the other end of the bench, leaving space between them. She’d read Lund’s file when the recruit arrived—the bare facts, anyway, the things that weren’t redacted. Orphaned young. Foster system. Recruitment at seventeen. Excellent technical scores, poor interpersonal evaluations. The profile of someone who’d learned early that other people couldn’t be trusted.
“How long has it been like that?”
“Like what?”
“The not-sleeping. The waiting.”
Lund was quiet for a moment. Then: “Since I got here. Since before I got here. I don’t remember anymore.”
“Have you talked to anyone about it? Yun, maybe? She’s—”
“Yun can’t help me. Nobody can help me.” Lund’s eyes stayed fixed on the brown dwarf, her face illuminated by its failed light. “You know what that thing is? It’s a star that didn’t work. It tried to be something, tried to shine, and it couldn’t. It didn’t have enough. So now it just hangs there, glowing a little, not quite dead but not really alive either.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m like that. We’re all like that. That’s why we’re here. This is where they put the people who didn’t have enough. The ones who tried and couldn’t.” She finally turned to look at Pryce, and her eyes were empty in a way that Reese’s eyes had never been—not hopeless, not despairing, just absent. “You’re like that too, Lieutenant. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”
Pryce didn’t answer. She didn’t have an answer. She sat on the bench and looked at the brown dwarf and felt the truth of Lund’s words settling into her bones like cold.
After a while, Lund uncurled and stood up. “I’m going back to my quarters,” she said. “To wait until morning.”
She left without saying goodnight. Pryce stayed, watching the brown dwarf turn slowly in the darkness, and wondered if Lund was right. If they were all just failed stars, glowing a little, waiting to go dark.
The fourteenth day started with a fight.
Pryce heard it before she saw it—raised voices from the rec room, the sound of furniture being shoved, the particular timbre of violence about to happen. She ran, which was not something she’d done in months, her body remembering movements that her mind had forgotten.
Vogler had Reese against the wall. His hands were on Reese’s throat, not squeezing—not yet—but positioned with intent. Reese wasn’t fighting back. He was just standing there, arms at his sides, eyes fixed on something past Vogler’s shoulder.
“Say it again,” Vogler was saying. “Say what you said about her. I dare you.”
“Vogler.” Pryce put command into her voice, the tone that was supposed to stop situations like this. “Let him go.”
“He was talking about Pearson. Saying things. Disgusting things.”
“I don’t care what he was saying. Let him go. Now.”
Vogler’s hands tightened. For a moment, Pryce thought he was going to do it—going to squeeze, going to cross the line that turned anger into assault. Then Santos was there, pulling at Vogler’s arm, and Pearson was there too, her face pale, and the moment broke and Vogler stepped back and Reese slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his back against it, breathing slowly, still looking at nothing.
“What happened?” Pryce demanded.
“He said—” Vogler started.
“Not you. Him.” She crouched in front of Reese, trying to get into his line of sight. “Reese. What happened?”
“I told the truth,” Reese said. His voice was calm, almost dreamy. “About what we are. About what this place is. He didn’t like it.”
“What did you say about Pearson?”
“I said she’s going to die here. Just like the rest of us. Just like everyone who’s ever been stationed here. The supply ship isn’t coming, the recycler’s failing, and in three weeks we’ll all be corpses floating in a tin can that nobody cares about.” He smiled, a terrible empty smile. “Vogler didn’t like that part.”
The room was silent. Santos was staring at Pryce, his young face demanding denial, demanding reassurance. Pearson had her hand on Vogler’s arm, holding him back or holding herself up. Lund had appeared in the doorway, blank as always, watching without expression.
“Is that true?” Okafor asked. His voice was steady, but his eyes weren’t. “About the recycler?”
Pryce should have lied. Should have maintained the pretense, protected them from information they couldn’t handle. That was what officers were supposed to do—absorb the fear so their people didn’t have to.
“It’s true,” she said. “The primary recycler is failing. We’re working on a backup, but it’s not a long-term solution. And the supply ship...” She paused, looking at each of them in turn. “The supply ship is fourteen days late, with no explanation and no expected arrival.”
“So we’re fucked,” Santos said.
“We’re in a difficult situation. That’s not the same thing.”
“It sounds like the same thing.”
Reese laughed. It was an ugly sound, hollow and wrong. “She’s trying to be a good officer. Trying to keep us calm. Trying to pretend there’s a way out of this that doesn’t end with all of us dead.” He looked up at Pryce, and his eyes were the eyes of someone who’d already given up. “There isn’t. There’s never been a way out. This place doesn’t let people go.”
“That’s enough,” Pryce said. “You’re confined to quarters until further notice.”
“For what? Telling the truth?”
“For creating a disturbance. For making threats. For whatever the hell you think you’re doing right now.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet. He didn’t resist. He went limp, passive, letting her drag him like a puppet. “Santos, help me get him to his room.”
They half-carried Reese down the corridor, his feet dragging, his body weight making every step harder than it needed to be. When they got to his quarters, he sat on his bunk without being asked, folding his hands in his lap like a child waiting to be punished.
“Stay here,” Pryce said. “I’ll have Yun bring you meals. You don’t come out until I say you can come out.”
“It won’t matter,” Reese said. “None of it matters. We’re already dead. We just haven’t stopped moving yet.”
She closed the door and leaned against it, breathing hard, feeling the weight of everything she’d just admitted pressing down on her shoulders. Santos was watching her, waiting for her to say something that would make it better.
“Go back to the rec room,” she told him. “Keep an eye on the others. Don’t let Vogler do anything stupid.”
“What about you?”
“I need to think.”
She walked away before he could ask what she needed to think about. Before she had to admit that she didn’t know. Before the fear that was building in her chest had time to find its way to her face.
The observation deck was the one place on Bravo-7 where you could pretend you weren’t trapped. The viewport was three meters across, curved to maximize the view, and through it you could see the stars—distant, indifferent, beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with human concerns.
Pryce sat on the bench that faced the viewport and watched the brown dwarf that wasn’t quite a star. It hung in the darkness like a bruise, a massive failed thing that had never had enough to become what it was supposed to be. She’d read somewhere that brown dwarfs were common in the galaxy—more common than real stars, possibly. The universe was full of things that hadn’t quite made it.
“Mind if I join you?”
She turned. Okafor was standing in the doorway, his posture uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure whether he was intruding.
“Go ahead.”
He sat beside her, maintaining a careful distance. They looked at the brown dwarf together, neither of them speaking, letting the silence fill the space between them.
“Reese wasn’t wrong,” Okafor said finally. “About this place. About what happens to people here.”
“You’ve been reading the old files?”
“I didn’t need to. You can feel it. The way the walls close in. The way time stops meaning anything. I’ve been here ten months, and it feels like ten years. It feels like I’ve always been here.”
Pryce didn’t argue. She’d felt the same thing—the strange dilation of time, the way days blurred together until you couldn’t remember which one you were in. Isolation did things to the human mind that were hard to explain and harder to fix.
“Before I came here,” Okafor said, “I assaulted a superior officer. That’s what’s in my file, the part that isn’t redacted. What the file doesn’t say is that he deserved it. What the file doesn’t say is that he’d been harassing a friend of mine for months, and command wouldn’t do anything, and I decided to do something myself.”
“That’s why you’re here?”
“That’s why I’m anywhere. You make one mistake, and suddenly you’re a problem that needs to be dealt with. You get shuffled from one posting to another, each one worse than the last, until you end up somewhere like this. Somewhere they don’t have to think about you anymore.”
Pryce thought about her own file. The disciplinary issues, the conflicts with superiors, the tendency to question orders that didn’t make sense. She’d never hit anyone, but she’d done enough to earn a reputation. Enough to end up at Bravo-7.
“We’re all here for a reason,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we deserve to die here.”
“Doesn’t it?” Okafor turned to look at her, his face half-lit by the glow of the brown dwarf. “The people who sent us here knew what this place was. They knew the conditions, the isolation, the way it breaks people down. And they sent us anyway. They sent Harmon, who was already fragile. They sent Reese, who was already damaged. They sent all of us, knowing that we’d come apart, knowing that some of us wouldn’t survive.”
“You think it’s intentional?”
“I think they don’t care enough for it to be intentional. I think we’re just... noise. Statistical variation. The expected casualty rate for an outpost that nobody thinks about.” He laughed, softly, without humor. “We’re not even important enough to be murdered. We’re just being neglected to death.”
The brown dwarf glowed in the darkness, neither warm nor cold, neither alive nor dead. Pryce watched it and thought about the supply ship that wasn’t coming. About the recycler that was failing. About the seven people under her command who were looking to her for answers she didn’t have.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” she said. “I don’t care what they intended. I don’t care what the statistics say. We’re going to find a way to survive.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out.”
Okafor studied her for a long moment. Whatever he saw in her face seemed to satisfy him, or at least to quiet his doubts temporarily.
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “I really do.”
He left her there, alone with the stars and the brown dwarf and the weight of a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep.
On the sixteenth day, Baxter got the backup recycler working.
It ran for four hours before the pump assembly failed. In those four hours, it produced enough clean water to extend their reserves by two days. Then it stopped, and nothing Baxter did could restart it.
“That’s it,” he said, sitting on the floor of the maintenance bay with the dead machine in front of him. “That’s all I can do. The pump’s gone. I don’t have parts. I can’t fabricate parts. It’s over.”
Pryce stood in the doorway, watching him. He looked smaller than she remembered—deflated, as if the failure had let something out of him that he couldn’t get back.
“How long?” she asked.
“Eight days, maybe nine. The primary’s still running, but it’s getting worse. Another few days and it’ll drop below fifty percent. After that, the decline accelerates. We’ll hit zero reserves inside of two weeks.”
Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours, give or take. That was how long they had to live unless something changed.
“The emergency beacon,” she said. “In the survival kit. How long would it take for a rescue ship to reach us?”
“Assuming someone hears the signal? Assuming they care enough to respond?” Baxter shrugged. “Six weeks minimum. Probably more like eight. And that’s assuming optimal conditions—the nearest naval base actually has a ship available, they’re willing to divert it, they don’t have other priorities.”
“Six weeks.” The number sat in her chest like a stone. “We don’t have six weeks.”
“No. We don’t.”
She thought about the options. The impossible options, the desperate options, the options that weren’t really options at all. She thought about the beacon broadcasting into the void for six months while they slowly dehydrated. She thought about the reports she’d filed, the requests that had been ignored, the silence that had answered her every attempt to communicate.
“There’s the shuttle,” she said. “The emergency transport. It’s supposed to be maintained for evacuation.”
“The shuttle hasn’t flown in fifteen years. The fuel cells are dead. The navigation system is corrupted. Even if you got it running, where would you go? The nearest inhabited outpost is forty-three days away at standard thrust. We don’t have forty-three days.”
“We might. If we could extend the water somehow. If we could—”
“Lieutenant.” Baxter’s voice was gentle now, the voice of someone delivering bad news they’d already accepted. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve seen systems fail before. I know what can be fixed and what can’t. And this—” he gestured at the dead recycler, at the maintenance bay, at the whole dying outpost “—this can’t be fixed. Not by me. Not by anyone.”
“So what do you suggest? We just give up? Lie down and wait to die?”
“I suggest you do whatever you need to do to make peace with what’s coming.” He stood, slowly, his joints popping. “I suggest you tell the others the truth, so they can make peace too. And I suggest you stop pretending that there’s a way out of this, because there isn’t, and pretending just makes it harder when the end comes.”
He walked past her, out of the maintenance bay, leaving her alone with the machines that had failed them. She stood there for a long time, surrounded by the debris of their survival, and tried to think of something he hadn’t thought of.
She couldn’t.
The truth came out that night, at dinner.
Pryce hadn’t planned to tell them. She’d planned to keep pretending, to maintain the fiction of competence and control for as long as possible. But then Yun served dinner—the same protein, the same vegetables, the same bread, portions visibly smaller than they’d been the day before—and Santos looked at his plate and looked at Pryce and said, “How bad is it, really?”
And she told them.
The recycler. The backup. The two weeks, give or take. The beacon that would take six weeks to summon help that might not come. The shuttle that couldn’t fly. The supply ship that had never been dispatched, had probably never been planned, had been a fiction maintained by a bureaucracy that had forgotten they existed.
They listened in silence. Santos went pale. Vogler’s hands clenched into fists. Pearson put her hand on Vogler’s arm, steadying him or steadying herself. Lund’s expression didn’t change—hadn’t changed, might never change. Okafor nodded slowly, as if he’d already known.
Only Reese spoke. He’d been let out of his quarters for dinner, under Pryce’s supervision, and he sat at the end of the table with his food untouched, watching the others with eyes that held something like satisfaction.
“I told you,” he said. “I told you this is where we die.”
“Nobody’s dying,” Pryce said. “Not yet. Not while we still have options.”
“What options? You just said—”
“I said the obvious solutions don’t work. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other solutions.” She looked around the table, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “We have nine people here. Nine minds. Nine sets of skills and experiences. Someone knows something. Someone has an idea. Something we haven’t thought of yet.”
“Like what?” Vogler’s voice was harsh, anger covering fear. “Magic? Prayer? A miracle?”
“Like anything. Anything at all. We’ve got two weeks. That’s fourteen days of thinking, fourteen days of trying, fourteen days of not giving up. And I am not going to spend those fourteen days lying in my bunk waiting to die. I’m going to spend them fighting. And anyone who wants to fight with me is welcome.”
Silence. Long, heavy silence, punctuated only by the wheeze of the recycler and the hum of the lights.
Then Okafor said, “The relay satellite.”
“What about it?”
“We’ve been using it to communicate with command. To send reports and requests. But it’s not just a communication relay—it’s got its own power supply, its own systems, its own functionality. What if we could use it for something else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a technician. But if there’s anything up there that could help us—any capability we’re not using—it might be worth looking at.”
Pryce turned to Baxter, who had been listening from the doorway. “Is that possible? Could the satellite have something we could use?”
Baxter frowned, thinking. “The relay’s designed for communication, not life support. But it’s got power generation—solar arrays, battery backup. If we could tap into that somehow, rig a connection to the outpost’s systems...” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It would take an EVA. It would take equipment we might not have. It would take time we definitely don’t have.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Possible and practical are different things.”
“I’m not asking about practical. I’m asking about possible.”
Baxter was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah. Maybe. It’s a long shot, but it’s a shot.”
It wasn’t much. It was barely anything. But it was something—a direction, a goal, a reason to keep moving. Pryce looked at the faces around the table and saw the first faint sparks of something that might have been hope.
“Then that’s what we do,” she said. “Tomorrow, we start working on a plan. Tonight, we rest. And nobody—” she looked at Reese, who was watching her with something unreadable in his eyes “—nobody gives up. Not yet. Not while we’re still breathing.”
The dinner ended. The recruits dispersed to their quarters. Yun cleaned up the mess hall with her usual efficiency. Baxter went back to the maintenance bay, muttering to himself about power requirements and cable lengths.
Pryce sat alone at the table, in the dim light of the evening cycle, and tried to believe that the spark she’d seen was real. That it would be enough. That they would find a way.
Outside, the brown dwarf glowed in the darkness, massive and failed and utterly indifferent to the tiny creatures struggling to survive in its shadow.
They worked for three days on the satellite plan.
Baxter calculated power requirements. Okafor studied the EVA procedures. Santos inventoried the equipment they’d need. Even Lund contributed, quietly producing technical drawings of the satellite’s systems that she’d somehow committed to memory during her training.
The plan was insane. It required a spacewalk of six hours to reach the satellite, another four to install the modifications, and another six to return. It required equipment that had been in storage for years, untested and possibly non-functional. It required skills that none of them had actually practiced, simulations and training that had happened months or years ago.
But it was a plan. It was something to do besides wait.
Vogler surprised everyone by becoming the most dedicated worker. He spent hours in the maintenance bay with Baxter, learning the systems, studying the schematics, preparing for contingencies. When Pryce asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I’m not going to die because I didn’t know how to tighten a connector.”
“I didn’t think you cared that much about living.”
“I care about Pearson.” He looked away, his jaw tight. “She’s not dying here. Not if I can do anything about it.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said since arriving at Bravo-7. Pryce found herself reassessing him—the charming smile, the easy manner, the surface that had seemed like it was hiding nothing. There was someone underneath after all. Someone who loved, even if he didn’t know how to show it in ways that didn’t involve fighting.
Pearson worked on the communications systems, making sure the relay would function properly once they tapped into the satellite’s power. She had a gift for the work—patient, methodical, seeing patterns in the noise that others missed. Watching her hands move over the controls, Pryce understood what Vogler saw in her.
“Do you think it’ll work?” Pearson asked, during a break on the second day. They were alone in the comm room, the others scattered through the outpost on their various tasks.
“I don’t know. It’s our best shot.”
“That’s not the same as thinking it’ll work.”
“No. It’s not.” Pryce leaned against the console, watching the indicator lights blink their meaningless patterns. “But I’ve learned not to think too hard about whether things will work. You just do them and see what happens. Thinking too much is how you talk yourself out of trying.”
“Is that wisdom or exhaustion?”
“Is there a difference?”
Pearson smiled, a brief expression that faded quickly. “Vogler wants to be the one who goes up. For the EVA. He’s been practicing in the suit simulator.”
“Vogler doesn’t have the technical skills. It has to be someone who can actually do the modifications.”
“I know. I told him that. He didn’t take it well.”
“He wants to protect you.”
“He wants to feel useful. There’s a difference.” Pearson’s hands moved over the controls, adjusting something that didn’t need adjusting. “He’s been like this since we got here. Since before we got here, really. He needs to be the one doing things, fixing things, making things better. When he can’t, he doesn’t know what to do with himself.”
“That’s not the worst quality in a person.”
“No. But it’s hard to live with.” She looked at Pryce, her eyes steady. “You know what keeps me going? It’s not Vogler. It’s not the plan. It’s the knowledge that whatever happens, I’ll have done everything I could. I’ll have tried. The outcome isn’t up to me—that’s up to the universe. But the effort is mine. That’s the one thing I control.”
Pryce thought about that. About the reports she’d filed, the requests she’d made, the futile efforts that had yielded nothing but silence. She’d been telling herself that those efforts had been pointless. That trying without succeeding was just failure with extra steps.
But maybe Pearson was right. Maybe the effort was its own thing, separate from the outcome. Maybe doing everything you could was enough, even when everything you could wasn’t enough.
“You’ll make a good officer someday,” she said.
“Maybe. If we get out of here.”
“We’ll get out. One way or another.”
On the fourth day, Reese disappeared.
Pryce noticed first—the empty chair at breakfast, the absence where his sullen presence usually sat. She sent Santos to check his quarters. Santos came back pale, shaking his head.
“He’s gone. His suit’s gone. The airlock log shows an exit at 0347.”
“The exterior cameras?”
“I checked. He walked out onto the surface and just... kept walking. Toward the horizon. The cameras lost him after about twenty minutes.”
The horizon. The edge of the small, dead rock that was their world. Beyond it, nothing but vacuum and stone, stretching out to the brown dwarf that hung in the sky like a judgment.
“He’s dead,” Vogler said. “He has to be. A suit only holds six hours of air. Even if he’s still walking—”
“He’s dead,” Pryce agreed. “Or he will be soon.”
She should have felt something. Grief, maybe. Guilt, for not seeing it coming, for not locking him down, for not recognizing the signs that were obviously there in retrospect. But all she felt was a kind of tired numbness, as if Reese’s death was just one more item on a list of things that had gone wrong, one more problem that couldn’t be solved.
“We keep working,” she said. “The plan doesn’t change.”
“He’s dead,” Santos said. “Doesn’t that matter?”
“It matters. But it doesn’t change what we have to do.”
The faces around the table were pale, shocked, struggling to process. Even Lund’s blankness had cracked slightly, a faint tremor in her jaw that might have been fear or might have been something else entirely.
“We keep working,” Pryce repeated. “We finish the plan. We do the EVA. We save ourselves. And when we’re done—when we’re safe—then we mourn. Then we deal with what we’ve lost. But not now. Not yet.”
She stood up. She walked to the maintenance bay. She picked up a tablet and started reviewing the power calculations that Baxter had been working on.
Behind her, the others followed. Slowly. Reluctantly. But they followed.
The EVA happened on the nineteenth day.
Pryce went. Okafor went. They were the only two with enough recent simulation hours to have a chance of completing the mission, and even then it was a gamble—hours in a simulator weren’t the same as hours in a suit, floating in vacuum, trying to manipulate equipment with gloved hands while the cold seeped through your seams.
The preparation took most of the morning. Checking seals, testing comms, running through contingency procedures that they all hoped they wouldn’t need. Baxter supervised with the intensity of someone who knew that any mistake could be fatal.
“Remember,” he said, as they suited up, “the satellite’s anchor points are forty years old. Don’t trust anything until you’ve tested it. And if something feels wrong—if anything feels wrong—you abort and come back. The plan isn’t worth dying for.”
“Everything feels wrong,” Okafor said. “This whole situation feels wrong.”
“Then trust your judgment. If wrong gets wronger, pull out.”
The airlock cycled. The outer door opened. And suddenly they were outside, floating in the black, tethered to the outpost by cables that seemed impossibly thin against the vastness around them.
The satellite was bigger than Pryce had expected. A lattice of solar panels and antenna arrays, hanging against the stars like a mechanical spider. It had been there for decades, silently relaying communications that no one answered, maintaining systems that no one needed.
They moved slowly, carefully, following the route they’d mapped out in the planning sessions. The suits were old—not as old as the satellite, but old enough that every movement felt like a risk. Pryce could hear her own breathing, loud in her helmet, and the steady beep of the biometric monitor that was tracking her stress levels.
“You doing okay?” Okafor asked.
“Define okay.”
“Still alive. Still moving.”
“Then I’m okay.”
The transit took four hours, not six—they moved faster than expected, driven by a combination of fear and determination. The satellite grew larger as they approached, its details resolving from abstraction into reality. The solar panels were scarred by decades of micrometeorite impacts. The antenna arrays were pitted and worn. Up close, it looked less like a spider and more like a skeleton—the remains of something that had been alive once and was now just bones.
“I’ve got the access panel,” Okafor said, his voice thin through the suit radio. “Starting the modification sequence.”
The modification was simple in concept: tap into the satellite’s power generation and route it to the outpost’s failing systems. Bypass the recycler’s degraded components and use the satellite’s cleaner power to run the critical functions directly. It wouldn’t fix the underlying problems, but it would buy them time—weeks, maybe months, if everything worked perfectly.
Nothing ever worked perfectly. But they had to try.
Pryce floated beside the satellite, watching Okafor work, watching the stars wheel slowly overhead as the rock beneath them continued its endless orbit. The brown dwarf was visible from here, huge and close, its failed light casting shadows that weren’t quite shadows.
She thought about Reese, walking into the void. Thought about what he must have seen, what he must have felt, in those last hours before his air ran out. Had the view been beautiful? Had he felt peace, finally, after so long feeling nothing but despair?
She would never know. Nobody would ever know. That was the nature of death in a place like this—it took everything, including the answers to questions that would haunt the survivors forever.
“Panel’s open,” Okafor said. “Routing power now.”
The satellite hummed. Something in its ancient systems stirred, waking from decades of dormancy. Pryce felt a vibration through her suit, a tremor that might have been the mechanism activating or might have been her own heart pounding.
“Power’s flowing. Telemetry looks good.” Okafor’s voice was tight with concentration. “Beginning connection sequence.”
There was a moment—a long, terrible moment—when nothing happened. The indicators stayed dark. The telemetry showed errors. Pryce felt her stomach drop, felt the hope that she’d been carefully nurturing start to collapse.
Then: light. A cascade of green indicators, spreading across the satellite’s control panel like dawn across a landscape. Power flowing. Systems activating. The connection taking hold.
“It’s working,” Okafor said. “The outpost is receiving power.”
“How much?”
“Enough. Enough to run the recycler at full capacity. Enough to keep us alive until help comes.”
Until help comes. The words hung in the void, uncertain and hopeful and terrifying all at once. Help might come. Help might not come. The beacon was broadcasting, the signal going out into the darkness, waiting for someone to hear and care enough to respond.
But at least now they had time to wait.
They made it back to the outpost as the day cycle was ending. Baxter was waiting in the airlock, his face slack with relief that he was trying to hide behind gruffness.
“You’re late,” he said. “I was about to send out a search party.”
“With what? We’re the only two who can walk in suits.”
“I would have improvised.”
The recycler was humming at a frequency Pryce hadn’t heard in months—full power, clean operation, water flowing through the system at rates that meant survival rather than slow decline. Yun had already adjusted the ration schedule, and dinner that night was almost generous.
The faces around the table were different than they’d been. Still tired. Still scared. But something else now too—a fragile relief, a tentative hope, the first intimation that they might actually survive this.
“The beacon’s been broadcasting for three days,” Pryce said. “Even at the worst estimates, that means potential rescue in six weeks. We have power and water for six months. We’re going to make it.”
“Assuming someone responds,” Vogler said. He was holding Pearson’s hand under the table, not bothering to hide it anymore.
“Someone will respond. We’re military personnel on a registered outpost. They can’t ignore us forever.”
“They’ve been ignoring us for months.”
“Ignoring reports is one thing. Ignoring a distress beacon is something else. There are protocols. Procedures. Someone will come.”
She wanted to believe it. She almost did believe it. The power was flowing, the recycler was working, the beacon was broadcasting. They’d done everything they could do. The rest was out of their hands.
The weeks passed. Slowly, the way weeks pass when you’re waiting for something that might not arrive. The outpost settled into new routines—maintenance, monitoring, the careful conservation of resources that had become second nature.
The atmosphere changed after the EVA succeeded. Not dramatically—they were still stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, still dependent on systems that could fail at any moment, still waiting for help that might never come. But there was something different in the way people moved, the way they spoke, the way they looked at each other. Hope, maybe. Or at least the absence of despair.
Santos started teaching himself new skills from the technical manuals they had in storage. He spent hours in the maintenance bay with Baxter, learning how the outpost’s systems worked, building competence that might be useful someday. “If we get out of here,” he told Pryce, “I want to be someone who can do things. Not just someone who survived.”
Vogler and Pearson stopped hiding their relationship. They sat together at meals, held hands in the common areas, shared quarters that everyone pretended not to know about. It was against regulations, but the regulations had stopped meaning anything months ago. What mattered was that they were alive, and together, and that being together made the waiting bearable.
Lund remained Lund—quiet, distant, moving through the days like a ghost. But Pryce noticed small changes. She showed up for meals now, actually ate instead of just pushing food around her plate. She participated in conversations, occasionally, in her flat and affectless way. She was still the failed star she’d described herself as, still glowing dimly instead of shining. But she was present. She was trying.
They talked about Reese sometimes. About what had driven him to walk into the void, about what they could have done differently, about whether there was anything that would have made a difference. There were no answers, only questions that faded gradually into the background noise of survival.
“He was already gone before he left,” Okafor said, one evening in the rec room. “Whatever broke him, it happened a long time ago. We were just there at the end.”
“Do you think we could have saved him?” Santos asked. “If we’d noticed earlier? If we’d done something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe he was always going to end up walking into the void, wherever he was. Some people carry their deaths inside them, waiting for the right moment.”
“That’s dark.”
“This is a dark place. It does dark things to people.” Okafor looked around the rec room, at the worn furniture and the faded decorations and the walls that seemed to press closer every day. “The question isn’t whether it does dark things to us. The question is whether we let it.”
Pryce listened but didn’t speak. She was thinking about her own darkness—the years of forgotten postings, the career that had never gone anywhere, the slow erosion of everything she’d once hoped for. She’d come to Bravo-7 already broken, in her way. Already a failed star, glowing dimly, waiting for the end.
But she hadn’t walked into the void. She hadn’t given up. And now there was a chance—a real chance—that she might actually leave this place. That she might have a future beyond these walls.
It was strange, feeling hope again. Strange and uncomfortable, like wearing clothes that no longer fit. She kept expecting it to collapse, kept bracing for the moment when the comm system would announce that the rescue had been cancelled, that they were on their own again, that the waiting had been for nothing.
But the days passed, and the comm system stayed silent except for the steady pulse of the beacon, and the hope stayed where it was, growing slowly, putting down roots in soil that had been barren for too long.
On the forty-third day, the comm system pinged.
Pryce was in her quarters when it happened—lying in her bunk, staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing in particular. The sound was so unexpected that it took her a moment to identify it. Then she was running, down the corridor, past the startled faces of Yun and Santos, into the comm room where the screen was displaying words she’d stopped believing she would ever see.
RESCUE VESSEL DISPATCHED. ETA 14 DAYS. MAINTAIN CURRENT POSITION.
Fourteen days. Two weeks. After everything—the failing recycler, the dead backup, Reese walking into the void—after all of it, help was coming. Someone had heard. Someone had cared.
She read the message again. And again. And again, until the words stopped making sense and became just shapes on a screen, abstract and beautiful and impossible.
“Lieutenant?” Santos was in the doorway, his young face tight with hope and fear. “Is it—”
“It’s real,” she said. “They’re coming. We’re going home.”
Behind her, through the viewport, the brown dwarf hung in the darkness—massive, failed, indifferent. It had been there for billions of years. It would be there for billions more.
But they would not be there with it. They were leaving. They had survived.
Pryce turned away from the screen and went to tell the others.
The rescue ship arrived on schedule.
It was a military transport, gray and functional, with a crew of eight who looked at the outpost and its inhabitants with expressions of carefully controlled horror. They’d seen the reports, they said. They knew how bad it had been. They were sorry it had taken so long.
Pryce accepted the apologies without believing them. She supervised the evacuation—the equipment that could be salvaged, the records that needed to be preserved, the personal effects of nine people who had spent too long in a place that had tried to kill them. She watched Lund board the transport without looking back, watched Santos and Okafor shake hands with the rescue crew, watched Vogler and Pearson walk up the ramp together, no longer hiding what they were.
Yun was last, besides Pryce herself. The older woman paused at the airlock, looking back at the outpost that had been her home for four years.
“I thought I’d die here,” she said. “I really did.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Thanks to you.” Yun smiled, a rare expression on her weathered face. “You kept us alive, Lieutenant. You found a way when there wasn’t one. That’s not nothing.”
“I did what anyone would have done.”
“No. You did what you did. That’s different.” She turned and walked up the ramp, leaving Pryce alone at the threshold.
The outpost was silent now. Empty. The recycler was still running, powered by the satellite above, maintaining an environment that no one would use. In a few months, someone would come to decommission it properly. Or they wouldn’t, and it would run until the satellite’s power cells finally failed, and then it would stop, and the rock would be just a rock again.
Pryce took one last look. At the corridors she’d walked for eighteen months. At the viewport where she’d watched the brown dwarf and wondered if she would die in its shadow. At the place where Reese had sat before he walked into the void, saying things that had turned out to be almost but not quite true.
We’re not going home, he’d said. None of us.
He’d been wrong. Most of them were going home. Most of them had survived.
But not him. And not the ones who’d come before, the Harmons and the others, the ones who’d broken under the weight of isolation and neglect. Not the ones who’d been sent here to be forgotten.
The system hadn’t changed. The protocols that had failed them were still in place. The bureaucracy that had ignored their reports was still operating, still sending people to places like this, still forgetting about them when they became inconvenient.
But they had survived anyway. Despite the system. Despite the neglect. Despite everything that had tried to kill them.
Pryce turned and walked up the ramp. The airlock closed behind her. The transport’s engines hummed to life, and the rock fell away beneath them, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a point of light in the darkness.
She didn’t look back.
—End—
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.