‘Do you want me to do it?’ Elena asked. ‘I can suit up fast.’

‘No,’ Chikondi said. Yes, his voice said. ‘I should do it, it’s my fault.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Jack said.

Elena did not second that comment.

The animal ran from Chikondi’s approach, but not fast, and not far. It was keeping its distance, but was seemingly in the first stages of understanding that he wasn’t a threat. It held still in the corner, turning its face toward him. It rose up on its back legs, sitting like a meerkat, the structures around its mouth rippling steadily. Smelling him, perhaps. Figuring him out. It is impossible to know what it was doing. To assume that it was curious would be pure speculation.

But to me, it felt curious.

‘I’m sorry.’ The words ripped themselves from Chikondi’s throat. ‘I’m so sorry.’

We watched through the window as Chikondi raised the gun. I watched him turn it up to a level that would’ve killed an Earth animal twice its size. He raised the device and pulled the trigger.

The animal screamed. A moment of this was to be expected – an involuntary cry at the end. But it continued screaming, and flailing, too, an obscene dance of fear and agony. It hadn’t died.

So Chikondi shot it again.

The fur began to smoke, and it screamed.

He shot it again.

Its legs spasmed, and it screamed.

He shot it again.

And still, it screamed. Despite the spittle that leaked from its mouth, despite the charred fur and the splitting blisters beneath, it wouldn’t stop screaming.

Jack turned away. Elena swallowed thickly.

Chikondi was shaking by now, the stun gun rattling in his hand. ‘I’m sorry!’ he cried. ‘Please – please just—’ He hit it a fifth time. There was a squeal, a shudder.

Finally, the animal was dead.

Chikondi threw the weapon aside and stumbled into the corner opposite the mess we’d never be able to fully scrub from the floor. He propped himself against the wall as he retched miserably inside his helmet.

Elena shut her eyes. ‘We’ll need to do decon again for all the boxes,’ she said. ‘Everything that’s in here, and ourselves, too.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll write the report.’

‘No,’ I said. I was angry at her, for no reason other than I needed to be angry and pragmatism was the best target on hand. ‘I’ll write it.’

The next morning, I awoke alone. My body was stiff and weary after the business of sterilising the contents of the entire cargo hold, and I had no desire to write anything, let alone get up. But I got up. I went to the comms console. I wrote the report. I sent it off.

I glanced at the comms inbox. The number forty-three hovered over the news download folder, indicating all the bundles we’d blissfully ignored. I’d seen it hundreds of times after filing reports, a nagging nuisance out of the corner of my eye. I’d long stopped paying attention to it. It had been there for so long now that it was just background noise, a graphical element. But that day, the number glared at me in accusation. The spell of Mirabilis had been broken, and guilt was seeping in around the seams.

An emergent thought itched. Forty-three. Forty-three. The number bothered me, for no readily available reason. I frowned at the screen for a moment, then finally opened the folder.

Merian news bundle – March 2162, the last file read.

My frown deepened. In Earth time, the date was November 21, 2162. Given the amount of time it took for messages to reach Mirabilis, and given OCA’s comms output schedule, the last news bundle would’ve been sent on November 1. That’s why forty-three was bothering me. Given the time we’d been on that planet, we were seven bundles short.

The Merian hadn’t downloaded a news bundle in seven months.

The emergency folder had no number hovering over it – a message received there we never would ignore – but I opened it anyway. Empty. Same for the mission updates folder. Empty. This wasn’t unexpected. When we arrived at Mirabilis, Earth would’ve only just received confirmation of our arrival at Aecor. But given the gap in the news folder, a sinking question arose: were those empty folders simply empty . . . or had something crucial been lost in the ether? If the news wasn’t making it to us, what else had gone missing?

Elena walked in from the gym a few minutes after I started running a diagnostic on the comms system. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

I told her. ‘I’m checking to make sure we’re still receiving signal.’

A frown formed on her face as well, but it was directed at me, not the problem. ‘Weren’t you running daily diags?’

‘Of course I was,’ I said, which was part of what bothered me. The comms system had never shown any issues, and yes, I checked it every day. A problem that had arisen over the past twenty-four hours wouldn’t account for six months of missed messages.

Elena watched over my shoulder as the diagnostic ran its course, as if I wouldn’t tell her the second I had any news. Whether she intended the implication or not, it stung.

The final report appeared. Green lights all around.

Jack entered the room, hair wet from his last shower before the next round of torpor. ‘What’s up?’

I explained. He didn’t like it.

‘What if the diagnostics are wrong?’ Elena asked. ‘Could there be a hardware problem?’

‘It’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘I spent the whole week doing pre-launch checks.’

‘Do you think we should do them again?’ she asked. It wasn’t really a question.

‘Well, hang on,’ Jack said. A third frown joined the party. ‘What if we don’t have anything because they didn’t send us anything?’

OCA lived and breathed by mission plans. If they wanted you to set your wake-up alarm differently, you got a mission update. If they wanted you to change your toothpaste, you got a mission update. News bundles were a scheduled part of our expected communications. If they were going to stop sending them, we’d have received a mission update to that effect. But nothing had appeared in that folder, not once.

‘Let’s—’ Elena began.

‘Yeah,’ I said, opening the most recent bundle. I glanced around as the file unpacked itself. ‘Where’s Chikondi?’

‘I think he’s still in his cabin,’ Jack said.

I looked at the clock. It was after ten. That wasn’t like Chikondi. ‘Should we get him?’

Whatever Jack started to say, it was lost as the video started. There was an OCA logo and an OCA employee in an OCA office . . . but something was off.

‘Hello, Lawki 6,’ the man on screen said. He cleared his throat. He seemed to be uncomfortable in front of a camera. ‘I hope you’re all doing great.’ His eyes were fixed off to the side; he was reading from a prompt.

‘Can you turn it up?’ Elena asked.

I checked the volume. ‘It’s already all the way up,’ I said.

‘Can barely hear him,’ she said. I agreed; the sound quality was mediocre at best. I listened to the man’s delivery, and though I had no proof, I was willing to bet that he wasn’t a member of the comms team. He felt like a stand-in, the person who’d said I guess I can do it after a long silence at a meeting. I started to notice other miniscule oddities as well: the sun-faded fabric of the OCA flag, a small corner of chipped paint on the wall, the heavy jacket the man was wearing indoors. Something wasn’t right.