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“You’ll be in orbit around Hades Exile soon,” the Patron continues, repeating the briefing he gave me three months ago when I set off after the disciplinary hearing. “We expect the length of your observation period to be three years as determined by the solar cycle of this particular planet. I don’t need to remind you that breaching the atmosphere will be grounds for immediate recall. If you do encounter life, report it immediately.”
“Immediately? You want an urgent report if I find a frog or something?”
I hear him sigh. “There is a small chance of human life on this planet. If there is, you will be reassigned. We don’t want a repeat of the last set of events, do we?”
I bite my lower lip. Yeah. There it is. If there is anything interesting to see, they don’t want me to see it. They want to bore me out of existence, that’s what they want.
“Alright, sounds good. See you in three years then.”
His stern tone softens a hint. “Be good, Tselia.”
With that, the connection is severed. I am alone. Properly alone.
“Bye, Dad.” I wait until he can’t hear me to say my goodbyes. He prefers I think of him as the Patron, just like everyone else. Can’t have him showing me favoritism, even though he already has a dozen times. Anyone else would be a pod person by now. I’ve been given chance after chance. I hope I don’t mess this one up.
The last couple hours of my journey tick by uneventfully. My ship seems to hang in dark space, and it’s as if I don’t even move as a big gold and blue ball slowly rolls toward me, a massive marble that swallows the sky until my ship is caught in the outer tendrils of the gravity field.
I’m in awe. Slipping up to a new planet is always an incredible moment. No two are the same. Most of them are hostile to life, but every now and then you find a place like this, somewhere the rules for existence have been followed. Not too hot. Not too cold. Carbon dominant. Beautiful.
They call this planet Hades Exile. It’s not a fitting name for a paradise planet. There are plenty of places where the surface boils at millions of degrees kelvin, where the air is pure sulfur, where nothing has ever been able to bloom into existence.
Places like this are rare, and evoke a yearning deep in my soul. This is the world as it once was, I imagine. This is how our genesis planet, Earth must have looked when it was still pure.
I give myself a few moments just to take it all in. Emotion is welling in me, excitement, joy, hope. The brief of this planet is an interesting one. A very long time ago, humans landed here. It was an accident and they were not expected to have survived, but if there’s still a trace of them, I will find it.
But I must be careful. My last assignment was a raging disaster. I was assigned to observe a small colony of semi-sentient four-legged beasts known as the Furri. Nobody prepared me for how incredibly cute they were. Of course, I went down to the surface of the planet and I happened across what seemed to me to be an orphaned baby. It was small enough to fit in my hands and when I picked it up it made the most adorable sounds and nuzzled into me. I knew I couldn’t keep it but when I put it down, it followed me back to my shuttle. Protocol said I needed to put it back out, but night was falling and the weather was bad and the little guy was having so much fun chewing on the wiring, I let him stay.
There was no way I could know what would happen next.
Unbeknownst to me, the pup I was playing with up on the ship was the firstborn son of an alpha. The beasts were separated into two main tribes. When the pup was discovered to be missing, the other tribe was blamed. War sparked within an hour. A bloody and brutal conflict that I could not stop even when I returned the pup. The killing had begun and the losses were too great for either side to forgive again.
War raged across the world for forty days and forty nights, nearly wiping out both sects of the species. In the end, only ten percent of the original population remained. I had inadvertently caused mass suffering, and forever changed the history of the planet.
I was recalled to the Patron and the council and severely censured. It was a misery for me and a complete humiliation for him. My guilt ate at me to the extent I asked to be put into stasis. I didn’t deserve to be among the exploration crews, but my father refused.
