Author: Jas Howson

Xero had been scouring the planet for scrap parts for half the day. When she and her partner crashed, their comms device, along with the rest of the important equipment on their ship – and their ship – had scattered across the planet. Frequent sandstorms prevent one from simply scanning the surface for rogue components – you could be stood right on top of a piece but not find it until the sands shifted again.

An advisor had sent the pair of scientists to check up on the planet’s research station. It’d been constructed a few years back, fully automated and programmed to send back data; UV levels, soil fertility, air toxicity and all that, but it had stopped about two weeks before anyone thought it necessary to do something about it. Xero had since adjusted the PH levels in the soils and monitored the oxygen levels with a gas detector. She couldn’t, however, sus what had gone wrong with the solar panels, or how to transmit the data back home. She was only a botanist. Sol was the technician, but he hadn’t stepped a foot inside the station since they’d crash landed.

There was a cool breeze in the air. It helped with the swelling heat from the planet’s suns, but it did little to stifle Xero’s boredom. She checked inside on her crops, kicked at the solar panels to see if that would do anything – it didn’t – then slumped in the shade of the station and thumbed through Sol’s old tech manuals for the zillionth time over.

She craned her neck to the dual suns that that watched her like eyes. Noon at last. Days were long here. Unbearably long. Since dawn had broken across the planet’s horizon 36 earth years had passed.

36 years since she’d woken up, parachute tangled in the winding fingers of a tree, facing her partner. It had not been the ship’s antenna impaled through his abdomen that had killed him, but Xero’s own parachute wrapped tight round his neck. Sol hung limp and pale, his expression permeated in that of someone who had died slowly and alone. He was twenty.

Xero forced herself out of her head and began comparing her scrap findings of the day with the tech manual. She had circled only pieces absolutely necessary for a basic comms device. She sucked in a long, dry breath. She had them all.

To the best of her ability, though she’d had long enough to teach herself, she soldered and twisted and hammered and screwed each piece into an untidy little machine – all but one.
She knew precisely where it was: in the same place it had been for last three decades. She rose and strode a little way from the station to a mound of discoloured dirt where tufts of grass had started to grow. From the ground protruded a warped spike of metal, which Xero reached reluctantly down for. She tugged the antenna from Sol’s grave, though with less force than she had from his corpse.

She brushed off the grit and dust, and attached the antenna to her mound of panels, buttons, dinted batteries and half exposed wires, fixing it with a despondent sigh. She flicked the power on, and the device whirred – a good sign – and shakily clacked the Morse key. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots.

And she waited.