She smiled. “Enjoy the silence.”
Then she walked to the horizon, as far from the shaft as her failing suit could take her, and sat down on a ridge of frozen ammonia to watch the stars. Behind her, the Sisyphus detonated. The nuclear flash turned XV-827 into a brief, furious sun. The shockwave vaporized the shaft, the cathedral, the sphere. xv-827
She staggered to the ship, pulled the emergency override on the reactor, and set the timer for ten minutes. Then she climbed back to the surface, stood at the lip of the shaft, and aimed the ship’s emergency beacon—the one she’d jury-rigged as a directional transmitter—straight down into the dark. She smiled
Her EVA suit was old, patched with memory-polymer tape in three places. But it held. She stepped out onto the surface of XV-827, and the silence was absolute. No wind. No seismic tremble. Just the faint, subsonic groan of a world freezing to death. The nuclear flash turned XV-827 into a brief, furious sun
But she had a choice.
Her training screamed at her to turn back. The reactor clock was ticking. But the symbols stirred something deep in her hindbrain, a primal, magnetic pull. She anchored a cable to the Sisyphus ’s landing strut and descended.
She scrambled back to the shaft, hauling herself up the cable with frantic, gloved hands. The pull from below intensified. Whispers formed in the crackle of her comms. Not words. Concepts. Stay. Merge. Become more.