We all spent the last 360 and some days travelling tens of thousands of kilometers through space, flying around a massive spherical fusion reactor, spinning in place as we flew. Gravity and photons and time did the heavy lifting, while we all lived through another year of absurd nonsense, waiting for the darkness to come and annihilate us all.

Unmask! Unmask! Unmask!

The ship kicked on the anti-grav pads and the shuddering plunge through the planet’s thin atmosphere smoothed into a gliding descent through the final cloud layer. The ship lowered to about fifty meters above the planet’s surface, a rocky beach of blue-black gravel and stones. There were some boulders that were several meters tall, but the majority of the rocks were shorter than I was.

“Ship, let’s go lower,” I said.

The ship complied, slowly descending to about twenty meters from the planet’s surface. The blue-black stones contained reflective flecks that glittered in the star light.

“Ship, do a slow advance,” I said.

The landscape outside of the curved viewscreen began moving. I watched it glide past, scanning the terrain for a particular feature.

It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for: a protruding lump of shiny light blue metal. It looked like an exotic skin blemish, an oval hillock of cobalt blue… which is exactly what it was.

I reached out with a finger and tapped the viewscreen where the mineral deposit was. “Ship, there,” I said.

The ship, a true circular flying saucer, rotated on its internal axis and obediently closed the distance to the deposit.

“Ship, set down with perimeter edge ten meters away from the site,” I said.

I felt, rather than heard the landing gear slide out from underneath the ship. It swung down and settled onto the surface with a gentle thump that I barely registered.

I got out of the chair I thought of as the “pilot’s seat” and took a few deep breaths to calm myself. As eager as I was to leave the ship for awhile, I always felt some anxiety when setting foot onto a strange planet. I’d done it a few dozen times, but it always came with a sense of dread.

Would this be the time my suit failed? Would the ship malfunction and take off without me? Would it turn its weapons on me and blast my atoms across this sparkling desolation?

None of these things had happened before, obviously. But one of the universe’s lessons is clearly obvious when you’ve been chasing resources in it:

There’s a first time for everything.

I came to the town of Le Mallard in search of my old linguistics professor who had taught at the college I’d graduated from some years ago. In truth, I was less interested in renewing acquaintances with him than in retaking possession of a book I had left in his care the previous summer, an antique journal of macabre and inscrutable entries penned by an elder ancestor of mine; a French aristocrat who had been rewarded for his loyalty and skill in battle with a ducal fief consisting of a coastal plantation famous in its time for its prolific citrus orchards.

Duke a l’Orange had lived to see his fief become a most valuable enterprise, thanks in no small part to the native labour pool of workers he employed, a people known for their unusual grey skin tone, large hands, and tree climbing ability. The historic name of this tribe was lost to antiquity by dint of the labourers’ own illiteracy and lack of an oral tradition. My ancestor came to regularly refer to this workforce as, “those grey-faced orange-picking cunts.”

“We should know pretty soon if he made it or not,” he said. It was almost a question, and he looked up from his disassembled firearm.

“Pretty soon,” she agreed.

She went back to doing her weapon maintenance. He took in a deep breath and sighed.

“You should get some rest,” she said without looking up from the improvised table in front of her. “If he doesn’t make it–“

“I don’t want to think about that,” he said tersely.

“If he doesn’t make it,” she repeated without acknowledging the interuption, “we’ll need to abandon this post PDQ.”

“You don’t think he’ll succeed,” he said. “You’ve already–“

“What I think doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s all up to him now. But we should be ready to evacuate if we need to, which is why you should go get some rest.”

He waited for her to say more, but she continued working in silence until he got up and walked to the crew quarters, his shoulders slumped. His mind was a dull exhausted lump of despair sparring with hope.

She was right, he thought. We should be ready to flee if we have to.

Mic check, mic check. Test, one two three. Check, check.