Copperplate with Patina.

Hope can be lost within, without acknowledgment, and you can usually limp on with life for a while. It is a fractured and cold existence, yes, but an existence nonetheless.

It is quite another story when the futility of your existence is confirmed in the face of a soul whom you admire and respect. Then, it is catastrophic. The loss of hope becomes the loss of existence.

Such was our end, and then mine alone. A series of lost hopes.

You could say Hope flew away.

After the rush of emergency embarkation – sound-tracked with the mundane screaming of data screens and sirens - the actual error had occurred with the casual finality of a coin dropped in a well.

^Hold on. Navpath co-ordinates updating.^

A simulated voice. Banjerrig, our pilot.

We had received the warning of anomalous solar flares from a beta-star in the system. Operational Risk issued the quit-code as the atmospheric readings pushed into the amber.

^More delays?^

^Negative. Squirt update and then we embark. Tallis just needs time to coordinate between pods - don't you, baby?^

Tallis, our Central Unit, hummed and clicked with her version of frustration. She got as jumpy as we did when there was a change in plans. There was a rattle from her cradle in the nexus of the tri-dock, and then the surge of raw data hummed through the coupling membranes between each of our pods.

^Cheer up Tally.^

^Just a few moments.^

^Will we miss dinner?^

^Maintain compound link. Belay override to autonomous function.^

A question one-two-three trill, and a flat silence. Then the sullen broorp of a failed command.

I had stepped out of my harness to see what was happening. I was team leader after all. I thought perhaps I could help. I looked through the view pane of my pod.

Kyanite-hued sands, frozen and somnolent, reflected the amethyst swirl of gaseous aurorae; casting everything into glacial half-light. I peered through the haze to the central cradle. There was nothing out of the ordinary.

Banjerrg too, had come to look out into the courtyard of the structure to give Tallis a brief inspection. Her eyebrows gave a waggle when she saw me, jerked her head towards the third pod - where thankfully Professor Dacen had already pressure-locked in his particular brand of musk - and then mimed snoozing.

I signed 'Hold Fast' with a smile. Keep heart. She rolled her eyes and mock saluted.

There were erratic squalls of static bursts as the Tallis updated and then a series of soft chimes to indicate that the nav-drives of each of the three of us, in Spem, Alium and Nunquam, had logged and calculated the new rendezvous coordinates.

That is what should have happened. Then, Banjerrig should have confirmed coordinates lock for each pod. We would have officially counted down, which is never not a thrill, if I’m being honest, and then neatly thrust as one unit beyond the planet's atmosphere to regroup along with our colleagues from the other teams back on the Seedship Long Acre.

That is what should have happened.

Instead, there was the click of some mechanical function being executed. Some button pressed. That was all; a command given to an operating system that was in the process of executing a contradictory order. Someone pressed the wrong thing at the wrong time. A finger exerted a few ounces of pressure. Fate locked the command in. Maybe the person who pressed the button didn't even know they had. We were exhausted.

^Negati-

I felt the tug of the thrusters activating for one third of the pod. My eyes locked with Banjerrig's through our viewpanes. Neither of us were in harness.

We were dead.

Banjerrig was always capable, darkly-humourous, efficient. She was tough and strong, like any Lucrezian sororocrat: even more so than usual. As a Romanovna Sky-Sister, she had more astral experience in her little finger than most of us long-timers have in our whole body. In spite of this, in that split second before the launch failure, I saw the little girl within. That's when the hope died. I knew it.

We were fucked.

There was a scream of complaint as Tallis tried to warn us, the roar of Nunquam's primary launch rocket, a simulated shriek from Dacen, and then my head was slammed back into the padded headrest of my harness as my pod, Alium, tried to both replicate, and abandon the Nunquam's action, simultaneously. The floor swept itself away from under my feet. Gravity held my head down like a tyrant's shame. Spit and bile flew from my cheek like a flag in a storm.

I dragged the impossible burden of my eyes to the terrain readout. The horizon marker showed diagonal, then vertical, as the pod's boosters thrust to port.

My pod had launched sideways.

I didn't know it could do that.

***

The Project aims were unclear from the start. They were both too simplistic and unnecessarily complicated. They were also a complete lie.

When asking rich people for money, especially money for something interesting, you have to lie. There is no shame in lying to the rich.

Ostensibly, the mission crew of sixty teams were sent to Nepenthe to conduct mineral surveys, with the aim of finding tracene, the memory metal. Tracene was used in the production of the Imperial bolt rifle, in the clasp pistol, the crux mortar. It was used in the deck plating of scourer drop-ships and in the production of the cleavers used by the Kesht questioner-monks. If you found tracene; glorious, malleable, impervious, self-strengthening tracene, the font of all death, you got money. The Armouries were paying for this jaunt.

There was no tracene on Nepenthe. It was a geological impossibility that there might be. The only way that tracene could ever exist on the sleepy desert of Nepenthe was if some external element brought some with them. Say, in the deck-plating of a trio of research pods. In that sense, we had indeed found evidence of tracene on Nepenthe... the stuff we brought with us.

So, technically…not a lie.

In reality, the teams of explorers who blasted down onto the sands were largely furthering their own research. There was not a lot of collaboration between the landing tripods, and, if truth be told, I don’t think that the mission would have been more coordinated if the scientists could communicate. They didn’t seem very good at communication.

One night we got wasted and Banjerrig made me try on Dacen’s white coat.

As a consequence, most of the communication was left to the team-leaders. We were decidedly not scientists. Maybe some of us had higher astrophysics quotients than your average grunt, but we were all ex-sappers; military engineers. Dirty fingernails and overalls. We tried to keep each other updated as much as possible, but we didn’t really have much mobility. We served mainly as a moral boost and therapy couch for each other, as we each lamented the eccentricities of our scientific wards.

Dacen was a xenopharmacologist, and I think he liked fantasy novels; he kept to himself. He had some theory that the dawn lotus – the aurora caereleum – which seemed to be the only example of persistent flora in our sector, had beneficial properties when ingested. I can tell you with all honesty that it did. I cannot tell you with all honesty what it does to you. Dacen was kind enough to share his research and manies a night we were able to further human understanding of the kind little plant. It definitely had both mood elevating and relaxing properties, while offering hallucination and mental clarity. The effect was wonderful…I think. The herb also had an aphrodisiac property that I needn’t dwell on now, but let’s just say that a few puffs of aurora from a homemade stim-pen, with a blue campfire glowing and a dancing purple sky above you is a good way to set the mood for…well, I needn’t.

But I was glad Dacen kept to himself. Although…that might have been interesting…

Our other job was to maintain the environmental nexus. Our generator; a huge white obelisk of a thing, like a massive dildo, had been installed by orbital puncture in the months before the mission. It pounded, deep and hard, into the willing crust of the planet, and shot up a quivering, ragged spurt of atmosphere. This ribbon met with each of the others that were being spaffed up across the surface of the little planet. They formed a great molten cover of terran-level atmosphere, in the form of a simmering mist, slighty pearlescent.

We called it sky-jizz.

It meant we could work without rebreathers, and could also move about like normal. Sky-jizz is good. You could say that on-planet, my job was to keep the sky-jizz…spurting. It was exhausting, finicky work, and the sand got everywhere. My hands were scrubbed raw, but we could breathe.

***

It took me most of the day to reconnect my eyes to the video screen in my head, and a further aeon to arrange a coherent thought. This confusion was not helped by the screamchorus of protesting instrumentation that flogged my ears the second they switched back on. I saw that the instrumentation was serenading me from the control panel; which was also the roof… and judging by the ragged tear and flattened area of hatchway which petalled out into the blue scrub, a new veranda I’d forgotten I'd had installed.

My suit, who never gets a concussion, hads already given me a mild sedative, a mild blood thinner and an anti-histamine. I would have sworn that a good dose of morphine would have helped, but I couldn’t articulate words yet, so I just moaned and drooled in a heap at my own feet for a while.

^Be quiet.^

I swat at the controls. My hand feels like marble. While I can see that the panel is still going bananas, all sound is completely shut off. I have managed to knock off the auditory inputs to my suit, somehow. In the blinking silence, I take a little doze.

***

She was a Lucrezian, which meant she was tough, resourceful. Banjerrig – Quejani if I’m being familiar – woke me up with a rough shake that nearly re-concussed me.

“Arlo, Arlo, please…wake up.”

I was greeted to her cold, muddy eyes absolutely scorching through me. For the first time since the last time I’d seen her, she looked terrified. I warranted that because I could see her eyes, she had taken her flight suit off. I knew this means that were not in space, because you definitely need to have a helmet in space. It was the first…thingy…learning…they taught us at the space…guys…place?

I was still concussed.

Banjerrig belted me a good one.

“Wake up, Du'gorrim! C'mon.”

Well, which is it? Wake me up or knock me out?

Her slap sent the slot machine in my head going again, and it took a long, nauseating, moment for the tokens to stop spinning. I readied myself to say something cool, sexy and heroic. Instead:

“How did the launch go?”

***

Later, much later, after all our efforts had come to naught, we allowed our terror and despair to simmer down to the kind of honest, cosy fatalism that most couples take decades to achieve.

“It’s not that I don’t want to die with you, Arl,” she said, “it’s more…that you are not the person who I expected to die with.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint?”

“It’s not something to apologise about.”

“Okay…sorry.”

“There was a guy I was dating once who shot himself, did I ever tell you?”

“I didn’t think you were that bad in the sack.”

“He shot himself on a date actually. An hour into the date, before we went for dinner.”

“Kinda hard to top that as a romantic gesture though, right?”

She didn’t respond to my jokes ever. That was how I knew she was human. I pretended that it didn’t matter and took a lungful of aurora so that the chalcedony sheen of her hair looked like the tendrils of some incandescent power.

“One of those Terran themed bars. The American Colonial Repression-era, y’know? All cowboys, and wide hats, and railways and genocide and smallpox, you know the one. A bit of living history, authentic alcohol, some dancing. We thought it might be fun, and we were so broke that anything seemed like fun. A night out. I was a cadet, so I hadn’t two credits to rub together. He found a discount night and that was it, that was our life…seeing what was on offer.”

“Wait, it wasn’t an attack or something, was it? No, wait, you said he shot himself…”

“They gave all the men a slug-thrower, like a bolt-pistol, but heavier, with terrible capacity. It just sat there on the belt, like an omen of something. Blieken had never even held a weapon before, let alone some greasy, stiff, antique like that. They had a competition for target shooting, little ceramite discs or something like that. Just plinking, and the winner received a bottle of wine or got the meal free or some-.”

“Oh gods, he didn’t…”

“The second it was his turn, he walked up to the shooting spot, and drew the gun out. Have you seen those awful things? The ones with the lever at the back? Well, he pulled on the hammer, and when the gun rode up in his hand, he looked down at it, he lost control of it, he squeezed.

I was so disassembled in the embalming kiss of the aurora smoke that I couldn’t even laugh.

“He blew his jaw off. It literally came off and landed on the toe of his boots. He had these black and white boots, and the jaw just padged off them, just splobbed like a dropped cut of meat, all wet and heavy. I didn’t see much of him after that.”

She looked around at the ruins of the project site. The frame of the tripod sat warped and perverted; writhed and scorched into a screaming nest of smoke-blackened tentacles. Her eyes drifted from the wreckage to me, and then out into the night.

“Why are we like this?” she said.

***

I cannot say whether we made love that night, but I do know that Banjerrig was gone when I came to. She had taken the Central Unit from Tallis’ cradle and made an effort to leave the planet. She must have cobbled together a retro-thruster system from parts. If she managed that she might get past the atmosphere, and then only would have to hope that her stasis equipment could work independently.

I can’t really blame her. She found a way leave and I didn’t. That’s the worlds we live in.

She left a letter. It doesn’t really matter what it said. It would have been nice to die together, I suppose.

She’s a Lucrezian, which means she is tough, resourceful. Whatever feelings were there could not overcome her sense of duty.

The chemtrail stops abruptly at about three thousand feet. I hope Spem made it. It’s nice to think that Banjerrig might keep some part of me going. Even just the memories a fond few hours.

Spem in alium, nunquam habui. Hope in Any Other Have I None

I told you Hope flew away.

***

The sky-jizz stopped spurting close to local noon. Without the continual monitoring and flow of the planet-wide system, areas of the shielding begann to overload and disintegrate within hours. For a permanent terra-form, the initial process for sky-jizzing involves around thirty thousand of these stations. The sixty that accompanied the mission was just a safeguard to allow us to work more safely. The web of sky-jizz began to overload and die, which happens in a cumulative manner, like a chain reaction, speeding up.

The pearlescent sheen dissipated; slowly at first, and then with a rush to clarity.

***

They gave us a little monument to take with us, when we came here. Technically, it’s an atmospheric transponder and data waystation. The idea is that the additional weight helps you get down to the planet, and the unburdening of that weight allows for an easier embarkation. Scientific data continues to come out, and interstellar communications get another little pit-prop, great idea. Scientists being scientists, the actual function of the equipment was eclipsed by the fact that there was space on the device for a little ceramite engraving plate. Thus the transponder became a monument.

The monument is supposed to stand as an ever-testament to the pluck and ingenuity of the human species. The monument is supposed to stand as witness to something.

“In honour of the crew of Scientific Expedition vessel Tallis, who, for the betterment of the Community of Humankind, surveyed this site on…” you know the sort of thing. Rank, name and date. Three eternities of thought rendered in modest copperplate. Three instances of complete human history in a poncy font.

Why are we like this?

I sit on my monument, my tombstone, and surveyed the planet I had come to die on.

***

You could say I died. You could say I didn’t.

***

I remember an old-timer I worked with once, real oddball. Timeon something…nice fella, but a bit off. Very late in his journey, and honestly more implant and gene-sequencing rejuvenation that anything his mother might recognise, but the most human human I’ve met out here in the Great Dark.

His optic implants, fringed with tattooing of scorched flesh, had whirred as they focussed in and out on me. His version of trying to pull focus in spite of the Slideburn Ale we’d been gulping.

“When we took to the stars…remember that humans only ever took enough for a one-way journey. We told ourselves that we were doing it for humanity, but really we were getting away from ourselves. We’re the only species that cannot co-exist with itself, and we know that fact beyond all others. So we spread out, and eat and hate ourselves and worship ourselves. Isolation in the name of community.

The stars were never our destination…the stars were a resource to feed our own need to worship the self.”

I wonder whether I’d have left too, were I in Benjerrig’s place. Probably not, but only because the possibility of being witnessed. Benjerrig was just a bit slicker. I would have wanted to…I still haven’t found myself out here.

Old Timeon had made me think. Even after he threw up on my boots, singeing a hole in my toecap, I thought he had made good sense.

I spent those last hours looking up at the frozen chemtrail from Banjerrig’s launch. When the haze shifted, I tried convincing myself that I could see the column of afterburn continuing on to the fringe of space.

***

I hoped she found what she was looking for. I hoped that she found another word for it than ‘duty’. I hoped they all did.

Maybe then they wouldn’t need to continue on with it all. All these things they have to find words for.

***

The sand was not really blue. That was the penultimate secret of the place. The sand was Everycolour.

As the nexus of the environmental web began to sputter and fail, and the planetary atmos layer began to disintegrate into friable motes of incandescence. Sky jizz rained down in burning droplets that flared and winked out into non-essence.

I began to see the true colour of this planet.

This being.

That is the last secret of the planet. It wasn’t a planet.

A handful of sand with the one million eyes of a space angel looked into my soul from the grip of my own hands and I felt myself come apart.

Hello, me.

***

It is neither internal or external, it just is. Like a fact, or a birthmark, or a kiss. It is everything and nothing.

I started to disintegrate and the process never stopped. A slow sprint of dissolution and a breaking with all pain and worry.

Loneliness was extinguished, and the cold depths of humanity and space were muted into the tones and sloping angles of time.

I welcomed this; this taking.

We had come here, each alone, to understand more of ourselves. Such fools these mortal children.

The ceramite plate began to react to new atmosphere. It aged and took on a dignified, austere, stoical aspect. A redoubtable patina, tracing like snatches of music, marbled out to add dignity to the fussy copperplate.

How quickly they give themselves importance.

Spem in ipsi nunquam habeo. Spem in alium nunquam habui.

I spread out my fingers and they scattered like the dancing seeds of a dandelion clock. They walked on the breeze, sensing out the possibilities of this new everything.

Swimming in the music of everycolour, I was an eternity of happiness and love, and history and time. Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.