Covalent: The Last Pair

The rumble of the Dwarf Probe detaching from the HavenCraft shook the station so hard that Piper fell to her knees and thought that the walls and floor would crumble from the force. With the tremor ended, however, she got to her feet and felt a simultaneous sense of relief and terror with the weight of what she just did. 

She had walked around, exploring the newly empty corners of the quarters her comrades had left behind. They had only taken the essentials with them, fuel, the navigation equipment, all but one of their molecular synthesis tools, and nearly all their tools to capture energy from the next star they'd find, to gather enough energy before returning to the Craft to get all the supplies to make this new star their new Haven. 

Piper poked her head into one of the rest chambers. She blinked in surprise, once, twice. 

The Captain's quarters...

Piper opened the door and peeked inside, eyes straight ahead. 

Even with her absence, the room carried an aura of brilliance and steadiness that reflected the Captain's character. Her bed was neatly made, the blanket barely wrinkled, the pillow placed dead center of the head of the bed, as if calculated to the nearest half-millimeter. Her spare coveralls were neatly hung in her standard, small closet, and her spare boots were placed with the same precision as her pillow. Even being secondhand, thirdhand even, her coveralls were neat and only lightly discolored. Only one pair of her boots had a single scuff on them. The Captain never said anything about it, but Piper suspected that she held herself to such a high and disciplined standard, not to gain the confidence of the fellow residents, but to grasp for some semblance of order.

Order wasn't easy to come by, these days. 

Piper swiveled her eyes to the left and found exactly what she was looking for. 

The books.

She stepped inside the room and knelt in front of the bookshelf. Very few at Haven had enough books to fill a shelf, if at all. Piper had a few related to various chemistry disciplines. She had been privileged, studying to assist the Chief Synthesizer in putting together all the bonds and molecules needed to build what the population needed. A noble, but mostly useless effort, and the past few decades had been nearly solely devoted to creating fuel for the Dwarf Probe. 

But the Captain had rows and rows of books, maybe forty total. Most were nearly falling apart at the seams, some were almost unreadable with the yellowing of the pages, but they were there. And they all now belonged to Piper. 

She gathered seven into her arms, not even looking at the titles, and held them close to her chest. She felt a wave of exhaustion hit as she lifted them, and realized that she needed to return to the Great Window. 

She walked down the wide hallway she'd taken on the way to the quarters, passing more rest chambers as she did. More treasure chests to loot. 

She approached the Window area, the great expanse where all would enter several times a day. There were small benches set up, but all but the weakest either stood or sat on the ground. The great red light streamed in, warm, inviting, therapeutic. 

She entered and screamed, dropping her books. One of their spines, a dry husk of its younger self, cracked and fell apart, a small spurt of dust kicking up. 

Off in the distance, maybe ten meters away, it was something she never would have expected to see, for the rest of her life. 

It was a male. 

But all the others had gone on the Dwarf Probe, and Piper searched in vain for a reason that one would have stayed behind. She herself had argued with her comrades, and eventually the Captain herself for months, everyone trying to convince her that she was crazy for staying. 

Maybe she was. 

The face looked familiar. The large black eyes and dry, brownish-green skin were standard enough, but his eyebrows were thick and angular. His lips were on the rosier side of rust, and his cheeks were hollow. He was probably in his mid-teens. He was skinny, almost bony, and his fingers were long and thin, more than the rest of them. And his hair was long, longer than Piper's simple chin-length cut, with a slight hint of wave. 

She opened her mouth to call out to him, but felt herself grow dizzy. 

Priorities. 

She stumbled closer to the window and half-sat and half-fell. She bent one knee and held it close to her torso, keeping the other straight ahead. She closed her eyes and sighed, feeling her body grow less weak with every second, feeling the satisfaction that came with the light absorption. She had cut it dangerously close with her deep exploration of her new normal. 

The man came over to her, and sat down next to her. He held the books, including the tattered remains of the broken one that she had dropped, and placed them between themselves. 

"Figured you'd want these."

"Thank you."

The two sat in silence for a few seconds. Then he abruptly turned his head towards her. 

"I'll take a guess, you're Piper, right?"

She nodded and tilted her head. "I'm sorry, I've seen you around, but I don't know your name."

"Oh, it's Shel. You look like a few other girls around here, so I'm glad my guess was-"

"Why are you here?"

He held his hands up, his eyes going wide. "Sorry! I just didn't want to go!"

She blinked. "Everyone was supposed to go. The only reason the Captain didn't force me is because she thought taking me would be a waste if I didn't want to be there."

He chuckled, "I never actually told anyone I wasn't going, I just hid behind the fuel vent until they left. Hit my head pretty hard with the force they left with."

She studied him closely. He looked close to her age, prime of his life, he looked somewhat healthy, there was nothing on his eyes or his face that seemed to signal madness. 

"Why not?"

"Sorry?"

"Why didn't you go?"

He shifted a bit, as if trying to find a comfortable position that was impossible to locate. 

"This is going to sound weird but...well, this is my home. I was born here, raised here, and I guess when the time comes, I want to die here. I didn't know where I'll be when that happens, if I went with them, you know?" 

Piper looked around and scoffed. "This place is falling apart and decaying, and you wanted that more than going elsewhere?" 

"It's still home, isn't it?" 

"I didn't disagree with you, it's just that, well, I'm sure most people thought of this as home and they still leaped at the chance to leave. It's just interesting, I guess."

He shrugged. "Well, why did you stay then?"

Piper's face drained almost completely of color. "You don't want to know."

"Don't be like that."

She picked up one of the books, flipped to a random page and buried her face in it. "You probably have family on board."

"Just an uncle, and he barely acknowledges my existence. Tell me."

The book seemed to be a history of the HavenCraft. The two pages she was looking at were completely illustrated, combining to form a sweeping landscape of the Great Window area during the early days of the Craft. Half of the machines in the picture were still being built, and there were so many people that they filled almost all the floor space in the picture. Piper couldn't help but notice how much more vibrant a green their skin looked than the people who had just left the Haven, even with how yellowed the page was. 

And the smiles on their faces, the hope in their eyes... 

"I really don't think-"

"If you don't, I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering, okay? I'd just rather know."

"Fine."

She snapped the book closed. The bang reverberated through the space, as if a crack in the glass, rapidly expanding. 

She tried desperately to squelch a green-tinged tear forming in her left eye.

She took a deep breath. "I have a greater chance of living forever than they do of actually finding anything."

Shel's eyes went wide. "Wait, seriously?"

She nodded. The clap of the book closing was still rebounding around the empty space, without any spoken words to muffle it.

Piper closed her eyes, and the single tear got tangled in her eyelashes. 

"I got a peek at the navigation equipment while I was transferring the last bit of fuel to the Probe's tank. There is absolutely no chance of there being any other red dwarves within 50 light years. They only have enough charges, fuel and momentum to go 25 light years, 30 if they're lucky. And they'd still need to make a return trip to get all the rest of the supplies they'll need for permanent settlement."

Shel looked out the window, past the fiery orb, and into the great dark expanse beyond. Piper followed his eye line. 

Nothing. Nothing but the dark and the cold...

She studied the space on Shel's face. His eyes shifted slightly in every direction. He was searching for something...

"Okay, but anything else they could use for energy, other stars or-?"

"One white dwarf, 36 light years away, but the wavelength coming off it isn't even close to the right length for efficient photoconversion. None of them would survive long."  

Shel's breath came out in a slow whistle. "So, why did they go?" 

Piper moved her eyes to her bare feet. "Do you want my optimism or my pessimism?" 

"The truth."

She eyed his face. Despite his boniness, there was a softness in his eyes, in his lips. His eyes shone green, with hope? Determination? 

No. Probably with tears. He probably already knew the answer.

"Well, I don't know, I can't know the truth. But if I were to guess, it would be to keep the people comfortable."

"Out there in space? On a cramped, dingy probe?"

She shook her head. "It's not like this place is in tip top shape either. Even if they're only searching for home, there's a chance for a future, at least in their minds. They know that they could fail, they have to. But they think there's a chance. Hope is a sort of warmth. And warmth is life."

"Evidently, it's death."

"Some prefer heated death. I prefer reality."

"A cold reality." 

"Heat death, if you'd like."

Shel laughed through slowly falling tears. Piper smiled, sniffed, reached over and wiped his cheek. Her smile wavered, as if a nausea had distorted her face at a molecular level. She sighed.

"They left enough equipment and supplies to sustain me for, well, a length of life to be expected under normal circumstances. I'm not exactly committing suicide here."

"I was."

Piper's eyes went wide. "You what?"

Shel rotated his head on his neck, the cracking noises punctuating the unspoken tension. 

"I mean, yeah, I was born here and wanted to die here, I wasn't lying. But something about being cramped in that ship, with everyone I don't like, breathing in their air, and waking up in the dark just scared me to my bones. Besides, I don't have much to live for or lose. I supposed that if I went quietly, no one knowing I wasn't there, I wouldn't hurt anyone, no one would feel bad, you know?"

His face had become an ashed hazel, the green almost completely wilted away. Piper shifted towards him, and stroked his hair, while his tears flowed. He didn't shake or even cry, but the tears blossomed and fell into the spaces between his words.

"And when that ship took off, and the rumbling stopped, I went out here, and I waited. I waited for the air to stop flowing, I waited for all the systems to shut down. I waited to close my eyes for the last time, looking at what gave me life. And then I heard you running. The fact that someone else was here, the fact that I wasn't alone, and that I thought someone else was nuts enough to want to die...well, I guess it made me think about living again. I hadn't realized they'd left supplies for someone living."

"How does that feel?" 

He sighed. "Makes me feel like I just gave up. But...I don't really, well...I don't feel bad about it. Is that weird?"

Piper shrugged. "I'm the wrong person to ask for that. I gave up without even having a death wish." 

She looked out at the red dwarf. SPE-302. The light was warm, and comforting, and for some reason, seemed more like a spectrum of color than ever. Yellows and purples and pinks and oranges danced along the waves that hit them. 

She cocked her head, not looking away from the light. "Sure, we could have made it a few more generations around this thing, but I'm already angry that I live around a star as dim as this. I can't comprehend how mad I'd be if I was handed a life with even worse conditions."

She closed her eyes and let the silence fill her, the gate of her mind being closed to what was left of the universe. 

She felt Shel's arm drape around her shoulder, and blinked in surprise. 

He chuckled. "That's the smartest thing anyone has ever said. Bar none."

She narrowed her eyes. "No one in the history of the universe has ever said anything better? I doubt that." 

Shel shrugged. "You're right, though. We can't win, so I'm not playing."

Piper shook her head. "No, we played it. We absolutely did. We resigned. And I am okay with waiting for a while before the end, but I am letting the end happen. On my terms. As much as they can be mine, I suppose."

She picked up the book on the history of the HavenCraft and chuckled. 

"I wish it had some blank pages, I'd fill in the end of it."

"Not like anyone would be reading it."

"It's still an end. On our terms." 

Shel looked at her, then to the cover of the book, then back at her face. 

He smiled sheepishly. "I actually don't know a lot about what the HavenCraft has been through." 

Piper shook her head. "Neither do I. I don't think most people did. This was in the Captain's chamber, I wouldn't be surprised if she was the only living person who does know." 

"Maybe you can read it to me?"

She laughed, a whistle bursting through a snort. "Read it yourself!" 

He narrowed his eyes, and looked at,no, past her. Then he turned his head in every direction, taking every square meter of space in, consuming every piece of space. 

"I don't know, something about it...well, I'm part of the end of the story, and it seems right to know the beginning and middle. And we got told stories as kids, the happily ever afters and crap, but this seems like something we should read out loud. Our story, the last ones to tell it and the last ones to hear it. Something poetic, I don't know."

Piper intently looked in his face, once again. His eyes were shiny, and his mouth made a small, but genuine smile. There was a naive, but powerful beauty to it. 

And the same thing could be said about what he had just proposed.

She stood up and tilted her head toward the window in front of them. She walked over to it and sat down, her back against the glass. He sat right next to her, and closed his eyes, clearing his ears for pure, unfiltered listening. 

She opened the book and flipped delicately to the first page. Her voice gently rose and fell with every sentence of the introduction. 

"Our ancestors, the first generation of Verdigree to leave Tombaugh 384, had survived every storm thrown at them and chose to escape one that would surely destroy them. When building the HavenCraft, they made an unspoken promise: to not go gently into the night, as was said by an anonymous source in eons prior. They set forth into the stars to find a new home, a place where they could grow, create, and sire future generations without fear and hardship. A place where their descendants would be proud to call home, from birth to death..."