Last Word

Mary Valente-Adams looked on in horror at the yellowed and barren landscape around her. Her husband's ship, the Tailormade, had come on its regular textiles trade run to the planet Agrus, but this time around, no one had answered hails the whole time they were in comms range. Despite no visible phenomena to interfere with signals, the colony still failed to answer. Captain Geoff Adams had ordered planetfall anyway, on the off chance that everyone was just busy with the harvest or something, though he seemed to be trying to convince himself as he gave the order.

After they landed and Geoff had begun directing their crew to various known colony dome sites, Mary had realized that he had known something was wrong and the colony probably dead or dying long before they’d achieved orbit. He was hoping to find survivors.

These people weren't just another colony on their route around known space lanes, after all; they were family, since Mary’s parents and her siblings, including her favorite sister, had all decided that space life wasn’t for them and found the newest colony that would take them on for whatever skills they could add to the mix. After those family members had left, Geoff had been the highest-ranked crewman on board their old ship, which was now too large for the crew they had left.

Instead of hiring new crew, folks who wouldn't know their ways and whose ways would be strange to the Adams clan, he’d sold the old ship, bought the Tailormade, and decided to trade with the colonies in and around which his extended family had settled.

For the last few hours since donning envirosuits and disembarking, the crew had been salvaging what they could from the mostly intact—if buried—habitation domes and looking through the colony records to find out what had happened to Agrus’s people. Mary vaguely heard reports of “sulfur deposits,” and some “cyclic wind storms” on an approximate “twenty-year cycle,” that the exploration missions hadn't been in a position to know about, as well as something about a bad harvest—or was it no harvest?—and some big colony-wide decision to mitigate losses which apparently hadn't worked.

Something glinted in the dust beneath her boots, a shimmering, metallic gold among the powdery yellow of blown sulfur.

Bending at the knees and waist, she scooped underneath the glinting object and into the yellow-tinged soil with her thick envirosuit glove. As she lifted her hand, a chain followed the heart-shaped locket she'd uncovered, and then the neck around which it was still fastened. The head and dust-converted hair were unrecognizable through the filter mask the corpse still wore, and the skin left exposed was desiccated under its powdery covering. Mary didn’t know enough about the effects of sulfur in decomposition to know how long this particular person had been dead. Her ignorance in this case, however, didn't matter to Mary.

Disturbed, she dropped the locket, neck and all, but as it fell, her eye caught the engraving: a stylized monogram, CVG, with the center letter being the largest. She did not have to remove her gloves and pry the locket open—its hinge was probably too powder-caked and dry to open easily anyway—to know that inside would be a picture of herself as a young woman on one side and her long-departed but much-loved grandmother on the other. Mary knew this locket, as she had been the one to place the pictures inside for its wearer to look at whenever their subjects were missed.

"Caroline!" She couldn't help the shout. Frantically, Mary dug around in the sulfur-tinted soil, dust flying into the visor of her helmet as she unearthed her sister's remains and clutched them to her breast, screaming.

Her sister's name was the last word Mary Adams ever spoke until her dying day.