Stranded On Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -doc Ba... -

Santa Astarta. A name meant to evoke saints and purity. The reality was a seething, iridescent green hell.

But the jungle is kind today. The bell-flowers are singing back. The six-legged things are curled at the edge of the clearing, chittering the melody softly.

The Gilgamesh hadn't crashed. It had been unmade . One moment, we were decelerating through a standard orbital window. The next, the ship’s AI, “Gabriel,” had begun to pray. Not recite data. Pray . In a language that made the comms array bleed static. Then the hull had turned inside out in a single, silent instant, and Doc Ba had woken up here, forty meters up a ferro-cement tree, his emergency beacon hissing only white noise.

They don’t see me. They don’t hear me. They are listening . Stranded on Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -Doc Ba...

Today, I found the beacon. Not mine. A ship’s black box, half-swallowed by a glowing fungal mat. It was stamped with the Gilgamesh’s hull number, but the casing was warm, pulsing with a familiar rhythm. My pulse.

I open my med-log. I type one last line.

I cracked it open. Inside, instead of quantum memory cores, there was a beating heart. Human. Tagged with a bio-stamp: BAATAR, A. – CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER . Santa Astarta

Doc Ba’s medical tricorder, the one device that still works, reads them all as having zero neural activity. Flatlines. But their bodies are breathing, metabolizing, repairing minor wounds with impossible speed. They are not dead. They are installed .

Food is scarce. The local fauna—squat, six-legged things with too many eyes and a chittering that mimics human speech—are edible after a fashion. They taste of burnt copper and regret. Water I get from the bell-shaped flowers that only open when you sing to them. I’ve been humming the chorus of an old Milet song. It works. I don’t ask why.

He becomes home .

-Doc Ba...-

They are here. The other survivors. I found them in a clearing the ship’s cartographer never recorded. There are forty-seven of them. All crew. All wearing the same expression of beatific, vacant peace. They stand in a circle, perfectly still, as a fine, iridescent pollen drifts down from the canopy.