Phoenix (part 3 of 3)

So now there are fourteen graves on the top of the hill. It wasn't easy to get people accustomed to burning their dead to understand why it was so important to me. Carson told me once to make sure he was never cremated. I’m not sure if the others cared. But I did. It had happened too quickly; they were gone too soon. I’d be lying if I said I had insisted for the sake of any other person but me.

Phoenix (part 2 of 3)

We packed ourselves into the Blob, the giant sphere the size of a small moon that contained the miles of machinery necessary to teleport to unknown places without a landing pad. It wasn’t called the Blob officially, of course. It was the USS Bold Venture. But Verzosa was dyslexic, and the first time he tried to read the name he rechristened it the Blob Venture. The name fit so well that even the instructors used it. The orb-shaped craft was huge, bulky and ungainly, built solely for space where aerodynamics isn’t a factor.

Our mission was to go past the edge of the map and make new ones, leaving behind dozens of 'bots, to build communication devices and teleportation pads. Every month we were to jump back into range to send a report. We weren't even out that long. I wonder what they thought on earth, how we disappeared before making our first report. They must have thought we were swallowed by the blackness of space suddenly, and without a single sound.

We had parked the Blob in the orbit of a likely-looking planet, and prepared to land. We shouldn't have all gone, but we were too excited to be held back. Captain Jeppson was the oldest of us and had actually been in the Air Force before our mission. He had agreed before we left Earth that the first planet likely to support human life we could all explore together. None of us could be held back at that moment.

So we all piled into the shuttle, and joked to cover up our nerves as we shook our way through our first successful atmospheric entry, the thick safety harnesses the only thing keeping us in our jostling seats. And we made it through the atmosphere. We were coasting down. We were ready to see what the universe had to offer.

I'll never forget the scream of metal as one of the engines collapsed and suddenly the entire control panel lit up like the 4th of July, all the alarms overlapping in a jangled cacophony. I shot out of my seat and lurched toward the engine room, the shuttle rolling wildly beneath me. I think Captain Jeppson screamed at me to stay put, but I didn't hear any words. By the time I had wrestled opened the hatch of the engine room, I was walking on the wall.

The engine room was crowded mass of metal designed to do everything automatically from a control panel, never meant to have more than two people in it at a time. I had only just reached the seized engine when the shuttle crashed and everything around me exploded into flying metal and wires. One of the loose wires, spelling death in its sparks brushed across the broken engine casing. The shock sent me flying through the crowded space. I crashed into the condenser; smashing my right hip and breaking my arm and cheekbone, too winded even to scream. I fell to the narrow catwalk that passed for the floor, smashing my knee and ankle on my useless leg and spraining both wrists. The condenser fell toward me and stopped six inches above my head, held up by a line of pumps.

I think that's when the shuttle stopped moving, but I couldn't tell for certain because my head was spinning like I was caught in an enormous gyroscope. I tried to get to my hands and knees, but my wrists gave out in a fire of agony and I collapsed. I managed to turn my head in time to throw up before blackness swooped in from the corners of my vision and overwhelmed me.

Time happened, slipping all around me in my unconscious state. When I came to, I was lying on the ground thirty feet outside the wreck. People had come to pull me from the wreckage and had patched me up. Someone saw that I was awake and forced a horrible spicy drink into me while others carried the bodies out one at a time and laid them in a neat line.

That’s when I felt time freeze, when I saw them lying there. People I'd worked and lived with for three years, people I had competed with fiercely and worked together to learn real teamwork. My second overcrowded, mismatched family. And they were gone. I never got to see their faces, never got to see anything more than their outlines in the dimming light as evening came. I was too far away, and by the time I managed to sit up, they were already being wrapped in great long lengths of suffocating cloth.

Phoenix (part 1 of 3)

Fourteen graves lay quietly on the crest of the hill overlooking the creek. The markers are plain, just a line of wooden posts already weathered gray. A fast-growing creeper vine has spread from the line of old trees nearby and is overtaking three at the end. I shift my cane to my left hand jangling the chain link necklaces, then yank at one end of the vine clumsily and fling some of it back to the shade beneath the trees. After a few more attempts most of the vine has given up for now, but a few stubborn ends lurk just beyond the posts in the grass. I slowly rub the accumulated dirt out of the engraved names. The letters are carved deep into the wood, but not as deep as the list of names has been carved onto my heart.