Chapter Four: The Tender Morning’s Dew

After a few days of fidgeting with the garden, both probes were completely done with their surveys. She had crashed onto a small desert planet, the second from the cooling white dwarf the planets crowded around. There were 10 planets total, but she didn’t get any significant data besides the types and locations. She would need to travel to each of the planets in order to gather more data. The planet she crash landed on was a heavy gravity world, in the path of strong ultraviolet light and X-rays from the sun. Dust storms were a known problem already, as she had to put up extra sheets around her garden to break the wind. As she guessed, her little rock didn’t have any Aetheria Ore.

“Captain” the AI voice broke the perpetual silence. “Yes Babushka- Zarya?” She croaked out. Her food supply was running low and she'd been trying to conserve the water, since the Sky Drinker Mesh can only do so much on a desert planet. “I wanted to check if you knew there was a molecular printer on board. Lev never stored any basic elements or compounds. However, since we are scanning planets for Aetheria Ore, you can collect the needed feedstock in the process.” Scratching her head, she swallowed. She never saw a printer on board. “Sorry, what kind of printer? All I know are the ones that print on plex sheets and food printers.” A pause and a soft whirring came from Babuska-Zarya, “A mo-lec-u-lar printer. It combines molecules of different elements to create useful items. I have 307 design prints stored, and you can make your own too.” Another silence but from the human side of the conversation, “So… you’re telling me I just find and store these elements and I can print any of your designs? But… umm… What are its drawbacks? Or… like what can it not print?” 

A cooling fan clicked on while she was speaking and the cold but gentle AI voice answered “ It cannot print living beings, including plants and seeds, hardened alloys like armor, or complex prints with several moving parts.” “ok…. Where is the printer? How do I collect the stuff for it and what exactly do I need to collect?” She was sitting in the pilot’s chair with the broken seatbelt by this time, trying to process a piece of tech she'd never heard of. “The printer is in the engineering room. It has a cover on it, as it’s a sensitive piece of equipment. The label is in Russian. It’s appearance is of regular wall plating. Press down on the plate and it should come off revealing the printer. You can use the mining drone attachments, in the cargo hold, on the survey drones. It’s not ideal, but it keeps you safe in possibly harsh conditions. It will bring the elements back and store them in the internal feedstock storage unit. The planet we are currently on is rich with  silicon dioxide, which is used in several print designs. Would you like me to talk you through attaching the mining gear to a drone and collecting it?”

A day and a half later, she had acquired a full load of  silicon dioxide. “Up next the first planet” she thought. She had decided it was up to her to name the solar system, since it wasn’t in the Cartography Core’s database, which was stored in Babuska-Zarya’s central computer. She didn’t know the last time it was updated, but with human society rapidly changing a lot of things hadn’t been updated, fixed, discovered, etc. Earth was in an odd dark age where the trillionaires kept all advancements to themselves and manipulated the rest of the population into thinking no major advancements had been made for centuries. The ultra wealthy paid the trillionaires for the use of these technologies, where there were still three classes on Earth, but separated not just in wealth and lifestyle, but in life expectancy, health, education, employment, etc. It was almost like the trillionaires were advanced aliens with types of  tech they developed quietly.

She’d only ever hear rumors and leaks here and there. Scientists dying by mysterious circumstances was a common occurrence, but no one could ever prove anything.  She continued thinking about her home for a while, and how despite the fall of capitalism and consumerism, humanity had clung to life. She hoped that there was still human life on the Earth; that some survived. Shaking her head as if it was an old fashioned Etch a Sketch, and moved her thoughts to the dying system’s sun. Earth’s sun was named Sol, and the system was named after the sun, which became standard for any human discovered system. Eventually, she chose an accent name, Eos. In the old human myth, Eos was the goddess who rose before the full sun, pale and relentless. This sun felt the same: not bright or warm, but relentless.

After entering the name into her pad, now linked with the ship’s computer, she sighed and created a short draft of her plan to continue her search for the needed ore on her pad. She pulled a pillow higher and forced herself to sit up higher against the headboard. Her bed now smelled of her, and felt like a little slice of home. She pulled up information about the planet closest to the sun, now deemed Eos 1. It was a Chthonian type planet; a scorched, dense, metallic core that was left behind from a gas planet that had been stripped bare by the dying sun in some earlier stage of death. She plopped the pad down on the soft comforter, sighed, and scooched back down in bed, yawning. The screen of the pad was still glowing next to her stretched out legs. She would travel planet to planet starting with Eos 1 and skipping her little rock. Her camp would be her base, and she’d tend to her garden for food. It was risky leaving her garden for months at a time, but she had to find Aetheria ore. 

She had gathered the early crops from her garden as she waited for the probes, and had the fridge filled with different leafy greens, carrots, beets, peas, and bush beans. It wasn’t the best harvest, but it was the first, and desperately needed. “Hey, Babushka-Zarya?” She said, yawning. “Yes, captain?” The sound crackled over the speaker in the captain’s quarters. “Does the molecular printer contain any fertilizer print designs?” She cleared her dry throat and took a sip of cool, filtered water from a simple metal cup. “Yes. It contains 4 different varieties.” Yawning again, she turned to her favored side and muttered, “OK, thank you.” She slept peacefully that night. Full of hope of possibly escaping the Eos system and returning to the Sol system.

She woke early in the morning, and actually felt a little refreshed, the first time in a very very long time. Bustling around, she prepared the transport craft for her trip, with half a ration bar half hanging out of her well-formed, soft-lipped mouth. She favored them for breakfast as they were fast, simple, and had a full nutrition profile. A grey tank top sporting crumbs, showed off her strong, well formed arms and wide, freckled shoulders. Her legs were left to the imagination, as baggy black cargo pants shifted, with her body somewhere underneath. Anxious to find the ore she needed; she tapped her right boot on the metal floor impatiently waiting for the electromagnetic thrusters to warm-up. After what seemed forever, they were ready, and she pressed the take-off button sitting in the pilot's chair, a makeshift seatbelt around her body. It was a shaky lift-off as the thrusters strained against the gravity. “I’ll have to check that later.” She said aloud to no one, and made a note on her pad to try to increase the power of the thrusters. After several painstaking minutes, they were out of the atmosphere and in an auto-pilot orbit of Eos 2. Blowing an out of place strand of emerald hair out of her face, she plotted a course to Eos 1 using the probe data, and engaged the thrusters again. They ran smoothly in space and she was able to untie the seatbelt and try to make herself busy.  She brushed her long bob back with her fingers and said, “Zarya, we’ll have to work on that take-off.” “Yes captain. I have a few suggestions…” 

***

They reached a high orbit about Eos 1 within a month. The planet was like simi-cool magma on the side nearest the sun. The other side was like an olden-time Earth cannon ball, smooth and extremely dense metal. She stared at it wishing she could take a picture. This whole unwanted adventure would be a tale she would tell her great-grand children one day. The probe was already on its trajectory, with after-market mining equipment attached. It would survey the planet and collect any elements on the list Babushka-Zarya had given her for the printer, and hopefully find Aetheria ore. She sipped at a cup of water and stared at the planet again. She never thought her life would amount to much besides being a mother. Now look at where she was and what she was doing. Her life bred her for survival, and surviving is exactly what she was doing, despite her not understanding that fact consciously. Checking the probe count down, she sighed and turned on her heel to face the door and the hall of the craft. “What to do. WHAT TO DO?” she thought, “Uggggg!!” she said aloud and walked out of the  cockpit. 

She was energized by the prospect of hope somewhere down on that hell like planet.  The stranded human, though, was left to her own devices, which she was very uncomfortable with. She preferred to stay busy and keep her mind focused on external subjects. “Yes, it’s a coping mechanism.” she spoke, “... but hell if I’ll let myself set into a depression and die out here alone in an unknown, and uninhabited, system.”  Blinking anxiously, she looked around. The spacecraft was a fair size with decent crew quarters, a spacious passenger seating area in the center, and a great hall between everything.  Her hazel-grey eyes slowly moved down to the floor and her shoulders slumped with the emotional weight in their chest. She attempted to push away the feeling, which wasn’t fully successful, but she decided to get some physical movement in. After following a quaint workout routine, she checked the progress of the probe. “Twenty minutes…”, sighing, she looked around again, and thought of Volkov’s chockies and trinkets she had shoved into a trunk in the cargo bay.  

Digging around in the trunk, she found some plex books written in Russian, blank plex sheets, an old damaged photo of a woman and a young girl, and other miscellaneous personal possessions. What she didn’t want she tossed into the recycler, a built-in subsystem of the molecular printer. She then welded together scrap metal into a desk in the empty crew quarters. She put the books, a chair, and her pad in the room. It looked so empty, but she didn't want to waste supplies either. A day later, the console in the cockpit beeped indicating the survey was complete, and Babushka-Zarya's AI let her know over the room’s speaker. Excited at the prospects, she  jumped up, almost throwing her pad down, and hurried to the console.  Reading the data carefully, disappointment grew across her face the further down the list she got. She had to remind herself that there were 8 more planets that  Aetheria ore could be on. The probe had collected iron, magnesium, sulfur, trace metals, which would be helpful at least. Heading back to her camp, she sat silently, trying not to spiral. She decided to spend one day planet-side, see if there were any more crops to gather, and leave for Eos 3.