Final Transmission

Here, the cold had teeth. It bit in and never let go, never let up, never waned. It was a kind of cold that burned skin blue and whittled away at brittle bones. Unforgiving. All consuming. 

Airman Connor Dudley found himself so unfortunately trapped right in the middle of it. 

Wind whistled off the deployed emergency flaps on the silver skin of his downed ship, an eerie sound that resembled a chorus of voices the longer it droned, the more Dudley thought about it. Swathed in half-light shadows and every emergency blanket he could find in the crash pack, he watched the torrents of crystalline snow swirl across the hatch window, tinkle off the glass melodic as rain. In brief lulls, the phantom-like clouds of ice would lie down to reveal the alien world that lay beyond, a vast plane of cobalt ice riddled with the gaping maws of leviathans, cracks that plummeted down to deep earth oblivion.

Well, not deep earth, exactly. This planet didn't have a proper name, just a simple alphanumeric designator on the skynav charts: PX4B-99. No one had bothered to name an uninhabited chunk of ice in deep space, far away from habitation and shipping channels and slingshot routes. It wasn’t on anybody's radar, was barely more than a cobalt streak in somebody’s sky. 

Dudley had blinked a billion times, hoping, praying to God that this was somehow all just a dream. Maybe he was in cryosleep, a process that often spawned jarringly vivid nightmares. Or maybe the Penrose engines had experienced a catastrophic failure, maybe he’d never escaped the gravity of the black hole he was accelerating off of, fallen into the event horizon, was experiencing some strange kind of cognitive dismantling as time as space unravelled around him.

But no, it wasn’t any of that. His instruments had detected the collision just a minute too late. He’d turned on the thrusters just a minute too late. It had been just a graze on the starboard engine, but enough to throw him egregiously off course. Down an engine, he’d successfully gotten the ship slowed to manageable speeds. But repairs, damage control had occupied his mind. He’d failed to notice that he was falling into the planet’s gravity until it was much too late. 

This was real. PX4B-99 was real. Dudley was awake and somehow miraculously still alive, watching his breath condense in what little air the damaged StarSeeker still contained. He blinked yet again, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment to melt the thin layer of ice over his burning retinas. When he opened them again, the prismatic halos around the twinkling cabin control switches were gone, the dull, mechanical dusk resettled. He shivered involuntarily, the thermal blankets crinkling around him like a freeze dried meal packet. 

Dudley was going to die here, he could feel it in his cold-gnawed bones. 

He couldn’t let it be for nothing. 

The burning fire of frostbite sizzled through his fingertips as he flexed his hands, articulated his wrists, willing feeling back into them. He gathered the blanket tight around him and rose unsteadily to numb feet. Toes were still down there somewhere, probably necrotic and held in place by his flight suit boots alone given just how much they ached. 

The metal floor tiles drummed with hollow footsteps as the airman limped across the bridge to the comm station located to the portside of the main flight deck. Chill frissoned the hairs along his arm as he reached out from beneath the blanket, tapped the touch screen with a gloved finger, scrolled the operations screen. The SOS beacon was active. A signal had been sent into the stars, one that likely wouldn’t reach another ship for days, months, potentially even years. When someone did receive the signal, they wouldn’t send rescue, likely wouldn’t even send a salvage vessel. In-atmosphere recovery was significantly more challenging than space salvage. A small ship like a StarSeeker with only one good Penrose engine still intact was hardly worth the trouble, and a long dead man sure wasn’t either. 

But at least there would be closure, or something like it, for Meredith, for his little girl, Rose. The ship’s flightlog had been automatically transmitted with the SOS beacon. A final black box reading would also be transmitted when the auxiliary power finally heaved its last breath. He wouldn’t be like some of the men he’d known in his years of service, swallowed up by the vastness, vanished into deep space without a trace. PX4B-99 would at least be some kind of unmarked grave. 

Something sharp dug into Dudley’s eye when he next blinked, moisture in the corner frozen into little grading shards of ice the moment they seeped from his tear ducts. He dragged a trembling finger across the frigid screen, wiping through the comm menu. A list of options populated the screen, the vibrant, Earth-sky-blue light of the menu blanching Dudley’s flushed face into a ghastly mask of desperation. He tapped one of the options. Tapped again when his weak touch did nothing. Tapped once more with all the will he could muster. 

A little green light fizzled to life on the comm station and a voice piped through the speaker: “Good evening, Airman Dudley. Would you like to begin recording a transmission?”

His lips, at first, wouldn’t separate, frozen or weak, he couldn’t tell. Nothing but a groan escaped his aching chest.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Please repeat your last command.”

“Yes!” It burst from him, a wretched sound, a sound already turned the corner of death even if its maker hadn’t. 

“Transmission recording.”

Dudley summoned every last ounce of strength he possessed to keep his voice even, to keep the fear from slipping into it, saturating it.

“Um–” A breath, sharp, frozen in his throat, his nostrils. He steadied himself, wrapped the blankets tighter, kept the rise and fall of his chest shallow. “Hey Meredith. Things went, um… A little sideways on the way home, but uh… I just wanted to tell you that I loved you. Rose too, and that–” 

He glanced at the flight deck, at the little sunny-smiles hiding in the settled shadows. A photo of his wife and daughter, always within reach. 

No, not those razorblade tears, not again. 

He closed his eyes and kept them that way.

“I’ve missed you both for a long time. I miss you every time I look out the window and see all those stars.” He swallowed razorblades. “I don’t know if you remember this, but Rose asked me one time if the stars got lonely out here all by themselves. I told her that they didn’t, how could they if there’s so many of them? But I think, um–” A shiver. “–I think yeah, they do. Because they don’t have a blue sky and green grass and lakes that speak the language of the wind on their surface. They don’t know what it’s like to get allergies in the spring time or sunburnt in the summer. I don’t think they’ve scraped their toddler and her ice cream cone off the sidewalk and acted like a fool until she stopped crying and started laughing. And I certainly don’t think they know what it’s like to sneak downstairs after the kiddo’s asleep, order a pizza and break open a bottle of wine in front of a movie, pretend like we’re twenty-four again…”

A long deep breath that stung, ravaged, burned. But he couldn’t help it, was so, so tired. 

“I love you, Mer. I’m gonna miss you, gonna miss watching Rose grow up, miss all of it. But I need you to promise me you won’t ever stop living, alright? You’re not alone down there, and you never will be.”

Dudley shut his lips, pulled the blankets impossibly tighter and slumped to the base of the comm station. Wind whistled through the ship’s fins. Diamonds tinkled the hatch, the hull, the silver skin of the downed craft. 

“Speech no longer detected. Transmission ended. Would you like to send?”

A last “yes” is all he managed. The real and true final goodbye. 

The planet’s sempiternal storm raged on, echoey and faraway as Dudley retreated inward, sinking deeper into a numb darkness. A pleasant darkness. A forever darkness.

And then, somewhere far outside of himself, through droning static of auditory fog, two words:

“Transmission incoming.”