[Dropship Interior — Day 15, 4:47 AM]
The soldering iron slipped and burned a black line across the circuit board.
"Damn." Monty pulled back, shaking his hand. The burn mark crossed the trace Cal had spent twenty minutes routing, severing the connection between the oscillator and the power amplifier. Monty stared at the ruined path, then at Cal, and the exhaustion in his face was so complete it had passed through frustration and arrived somewhere beyond it.
"I can bridge it." Cal reached for the copper wire. His fingers fumbled — coordination degrading, the caloric deficit turning his fine motor skills to approximations. He'd eaten his last ration bar three hours ago. His stomach had moved past hunger into a flat, persistent ache that colored everything gray.
They'd been at the workbench for fourteen hours straight. The dropship's interior was lit by the salvaged lamp and the faint glow of the transmitter's indicator light, which pulsed green when the system was powered and red when something was wrong. It had been red for the last forty minutes.
Cal stripped the wire with his teeth — a habit now, the wire strippers long since dulled to uselessness — and bridged the burned trace with a careful loop of copper. His hands were steady enough. Barely. The nanomachine hum behind his eyes had escalated to a persistent drone, and his headache had become a second heartbeat.
"Try it," he said.
Monty powered the oscillator. The indicator light flickered — red, red, green. Held green. The frequency readout on the improvised display stabilized at 121.5 megahertz. Emergency band. The one the Ark never stopped listening to.
"Signal strength?" Cal asked.
"Twelve percent above minimum for orbital detection." Monty's voice was flat with fatigue, but beneath it — barely — was something else. "It should work. If the Ark's passive receivers are scanning, they'll pick this up."
Should. Cal hated should. Should meant probability, and probability meant a margin where three hundred people died because the signal bounced wrong off an ionospheric layer or the Ark's receiver had a maintenance gap at the wrong hour.
"Broadcast," Cal said.
Monty looked at him. The moment held weight — two teenagers in a metal tube, about to shout into the void and hope someone was listening. Then Monty pressed the transmit key.
The transmitter hummed. The antenna — mounted in the viewport slit, angled toward the pre-dawn sky — radiated a signal Cal couldn't see or hear but could feel through the vibration in the workbench. Energy leaving the ship, climbing through atmosphere, punching toward orbit.
"The 100 are alive," Monty spoke into the microphone, his voice cracking once before steadying. "Earth is survivable. Repeat — Earth is survivable. We are at the dropship landing coordinates. The 100 are alive."
He transmitted the message three times. Then switched to a repeating automated loop and sat back.
They waited.
Dawn bled through the viewport — gray, then gold. The camp stirred outside. Voices, footsteps, the sound of the wall crew assembling for the morning shift. Cal sat on the floor beside the workbench, back against the hull, too tired to stand and too wired to sleep. The transmitter pulsed its message into the sky every thirty seconds, a heartbeat aimed at the stars.
The response came at 6:12 AM.
Static first — a wash of white noise that made Monty lunge for the receiver. Then, through the hiss, a voice. Thin. Distorted. Human.
"—confirm transmission. This is Ark Station. We receive you. Confirm — are you broadcasting from the surface?"
Monty's hands were shaking. Cal's were too. Monty grabbed the microphone.
"Ark Station, this is Monty Green, one of the hundred. We are on the ground. Earth is survivable. Air is breathable. Water is available. We are alive."
A pause. The static breathed. Then the voice returned, and something in its cadence had changed — heavier, slower, carrying a weight that pressed through the signal distortion.
"Confirmed, Monty Green. Earth is survivable. Message received." Another pause. "The Council... the Council had already acted. The population reduction occurred nine hours ago. Three hundred and twenty volunteers. The decision was made at 2100 hours last night."
The transmitter hummed.
Monty's hand was still on the microphone. His mouth was open. No sound came out.
Cal stared at the workbench. The soldering iron. The circuit board with its bridged trace. The oscillator crystal he'd scavenged from the navigation system, cracked but functional. Every component represented hours of work, days of planning, two teenagers burning through sleep and sanity to get this thing operational before the clock ran out.
Six hours. The signal had reached the Ark six hours after the culling. Nine hours of dead air between the Council's decision and their broadcast. If they'd finished yesterday — if the soldering iron hadn't slipped, if the antenna gain hadn't needed boosting, if Cal had skipped the trap briefing and spent those hours on the transmitter instead—
Three hundred and twenty people.
He closed his eyes. The number settled into his chest next to Derek's name, next to the faces of the two kids who'd unstrapped during atmospheric entry and died on impact. A growing collection. A ledger that didn't balance.
"Cal." Monty's voice was small. "Cal, that's... three hundred and twenty."
"Yeah."
"If we'd finished yesterday—"
"I know."
"Six hours. We were six hours—"
"I know, Monty."
Silence. The transmitter kept broadcasting. The Ark kept listening. Three hundred and twenty people had walked into airlocks and the doors had closed, and now there was a signal in the sky proving the sacrifice had been unnecessary.
Clarke found them twenty minutes later. She read the situation in their faces — Monty staring at the wall, Cal sitting on the floor with his hands between his knees — and listened to the Ark's recorded response without speaking. When it finished, she turned off the playback and sat down on a crate.
"You got the signal through," she said.
"Not fast enough," Cal said.
"You got it through. The Ark knows we're alive. That changes everything going forward."
"It doesn't change what already happened."
Clarke's jaw tightened. For a moment, the surgeon's mask cracked and something personal moved beneath — grief, maybe, or the specific weight of a seventeen-year-old carrying the knowledge that her mother was on a space station where three hundred people had just died.
"No," she said. "It doesn't."
---
Cal walked the perimeter alone that afternoon. The wall was seventy percent complete — the eastern and northern sections solid, the southern section progressing, the western gap left open by design. He ran his palm along the rough-hewn logs, feeling the bark scrape his calluses, and let the physical sensation anchor him to the present.
Three hundred and twenty. He'd known this would happen. The show had shown the culling — the quiet line of volunteers, the airlock doors closing, the bodies drifting into space. He'd built the transmitter specifically to prevent it. And he'd failed.
The timeline had corrected. That was the terrifying part. He'd moved faster than canon — started the transmitter days earlier, recruited Monty sooner, pushed the technical work harder. And the culling had happened anyway, as though the universe had a weight to it, a momentum that resisted change on this scale.
Or he'd simply been too slow. No cosmic forces required. Just a teenager with a soldering iron and not enough hours.
He found a quiet spot behind the dropship — his creation-quirk testing ground, screened from the camp — and sat in the dirt. His wristband caught the afternoon light. He pulled a piece of charcoal from his pocket and scratched into the band's inner surface, pressing hard, the characters small and precise.
1.
The charcoal broke twice. He picked up the pieces and kept pressing until the numbers were dark and permanent against the metal. A private record. No ritual. No monument. Just a number he'd carry on his skin so he couldn't pretend it wasn't there.
Monty found him an hour later, puffy-eyed but functional, carrying two ration bars.
"Ark's transmitting supply coordinates," Monty said. He sat down and handed Cal a bar. "They want us to hold position. A team is being sent."
"Raven," Cal murmured, and caught himself.
"What?"
"Nothing. How long until they send someone?"
"They didn't say. Days, maybe. They're dealing with—" Monty's voice hitched. "—with the aftermath."
Cal ate the ration bar. Then the second one. Still hungry. Always hungry.
Monty sat beside him and did the math on who among the three hundred and twenty might have had children on the dropship. He listed names, cross-referencing from the Ark's publicly available population registry he'd memorized, and Cal watched the weight of each name land on Monty's shoulders the way the weight of 320 had landed on his own.
Some burdens you shared. Some you just carried in parallel.
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You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
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