Horizon Glass
ELIAS’S POV
The bridge light at this hour always reminded me of shallow water… warm blue spilling across consoles, pooling in the seams of deck plating. I pressed my thumb against the coin in my pocket, felt the milled edge bite into the pad. Cold. Always cold, no matter how long I carried it.
The private scanner sat in the niche beside my captain’s chair, its surface no bigger than my palm. I drew the neural fragment from my jacket… Anna’s fragment, though I never said her name aloud on duty… and slid it into the groove. The scanner’s hum rose half an octave. I leaned close.
“Still here,” I whispered.
The fragment pulsed once. Green, then amber. The same sequence as yesterday. As every day for the past eleven months.
I pocketed it and turned to the forward viewport. Virella hung there, fat and white-gold in the black. The horizon window bisected it… a long c***k in the reinforced glass that maintenance had logged but never prioritized. Fractures spiderwebbed from the central split, and when the ship rotated just right, station light bent through them, scattering in thin rainbows across my hands.
“Captain.” Lyra’s voice, quiet from the comms station. “Long-range receiver’s picking up something.”
I crossed to her console. She’d already isolated the frequency… a low, rhythmic pulse buried in the background radiation. Not a distress beacon. Not stellar noise. Something else.
“How long?” I asked.
“Fourteen hours. Started when we entered orbit.”
The pulse repeated. Three beats, pause, three beats. Lyra’s fingers hovered over the file-transfer key. She glanced up at me, then copied the recording to a private partition without a word. I nodded once.
“Log it as ambient interference,” I said. “For now.”
The shuttle dropped through Virella’s upper atmosphere with a shudder that rattled my molars. I gripped the overhead bar and watched the viewport fill with white… not clouds, but vast stretches of sand that curved toward a turquoise coastline. The air outside, according to the external sensors, carried trace organics: floral compounds, salt, something the computer tagged as unclassified aromatic hydrocarbon.
Davi sat across from me, helmet loose in her lap, humming under her breath. A lullaby, I thought. Simple notes that rose and fell like breathing.
“Nervous?” I asked.
She stopped humming. “No, sir.”
But her knuckles were bone-white around the helmet’s rim.
The shuttle’s ramp hissed open, and the air rolled in… thick, sweet, warmer than I’d expected. I descended first, boots sinking half an inch into the sand. The sun sat low on the horizon, casting long shadows that stretched toward the surf. Motes drifted in the air, pale and slow, catching the light like suspended static. I reached out. One landed on my glove, flickered, vanished.
Rhee’s scanner chirped. “Atmosphere’s clean. No pathogens flagged.”
I pulled off my helmet. The floral scent hit harder without the filter… jasmine, maybe, or something close. Underneath it, salt and rot. The ocean whispered against the sand, a rhythm almost identical to the pulse Lyra had logged.
Davi stepped onto the ramp behind me, still humming. She set her helmet down and tilted her head, listening.
“Ensign?” Rhee called.
Davi didn’t answer. Her gaze fixed on the water, and her lips curved into a smile… slow, dreamy, like she’d just recognized someone. She took a step forward.
“Ensign Corren,” I said.
She took another step, then another, descending the ramp with the careful precision of someone walking a tightrope. The motes thickened around her. She raised one hand as if to touch something.
“Davi.” Rhee moved faster than I did, crossing the sand in four strides. She caught Davi by the arm and wrenched her back. Davi stumbled, blinked, and the smile collapsed.
“What—” Davi’s voice cracked. She looked down at Rhee’s hand, then at the water. “She was… she was right there.”
“Who?” I asked.
Davi’s pupils were blown wide, black swallowing brown. “My sister. She was standing in the water. She waved at me.”
Rhee didn’t let go. “Your sister’s on Europa Station.”
“I know,” Davi whispered. “I know that.”
I scanned the beach. Empty. Just white sand, the surf, and those slow-drifting motes catching the last of the sun. The shuttle’s speakers crackled… static, maybe, or the wind across the microphones.
“Back to the shuttle,” I said. “Everyone. Now.”
Rhee guided Davi up the ramp. I followed, pulling my helmet back on. The motes pressed closer, clustering near the ramp’s edge like curious fish. I keyed the comms.
“Bridge, this is Kaen. Abort surface operations. I want neural scans for the entire away team, and I want this site quarantined until we know what the hell just happened.”
Lyra’s voice came through, tight and clipped. “Understood, Captain. Bringing you up.”
The ramp began to close. I watched the beach through the narrowing gap… the white sand, the darkening water, the motes swirling in lazy spirals. My hand found the coin in my pocket again. I pressed my thumb against the edge until it hurt.
The ramp is sealed. The shuttle’s engines whined, preparing for ascent.
Then, from the niche in my jacket, the private scanner emitted a soft, single note. I froze.
Anna’s voice, barely audible, threaded through the scanner’s hum: “Elias.”
Not a recording. Not a fragment echo.
My breath stopped.
The shuttle speakers crackled again. This time, not static. A voice… distant, filtered through wind and waves… rose from the beach below.
“Anna.”
Someone was calling her name.
