The Last Colonist

Chapter 1: Blue Sky Countdown

The sky over Kepler-442b was the color of a bruise healing into blue, and Lukas Solano had spent eleven years learning to love it.

He stood at the edge of the equatorial ridge, a strip of basalt that the colonists called the Spine, and watched the dawn roll in from the east. The star—Kepler-442, catalogued and named long before any human eye had seen it—rose fat and orange above the horizon, painting the engineered grasslands in shades of copper and gold. The air smelled of iron and ozone and the faintest trace of engineered clover, a scent that had taken three generations of atmospheric processors to coax from this world's stubborn chemistry.

Seventeen hundred light-years from Earth. That number had stopped meaning anything to Lukas years ago. Earth was an abstraction, a word in old databases. This was home.

He checked his wrist display. 06:14 local. The terraforming station at Grid Seven needed its nitrogen cyclers recalibrated before the morning shift, and he was already running behind. He turned from the ridge and started down the gravel path toward the equipment depot, his boots crunching in the loose regolith that still surfaced through the engineered soil in patches, like the planet reminding them it hadn't fully surrendered.

The colony—officially designated Settlement Aurelia, though no one called it that—spread across the equatorial band in a loose constellation of pressurized habitats, open-air structures, and agricultural domes. Two hundred and three souls, last census. Engineers, biologists, agronomists, medical staff, administrators, and the children who'd been born here and knew no other sky. The interstellar transport Perseverance sat on its landing pad three kilometers south, a sleek needle of titanium and carbon composite that had carried them here and would, theoretically, carry them away again if the project failed.

It hadn't failed. That was the remarkable thing. Forty-one years of work—twenty before Lukas arrived, twenty-one with him in the thick of it—had transformed a narrow belt of this rocky world from a sterile, wind-scoured waste into something approaching livable. The atmosphere was breathable now, if thin. The soil grew crops. Rain fell, mostly where they wanted it to.

Lukas was proud of that. Quietly, stubbornly proud.

He reached the equipment depot at 06:22, a squat ferrocrete building half-buried in the hillside, and keyed open the door with his palm. Inside, the air was cooler, tinged with the smell of lubricant and ozone from the fabrication units that lined the back wall. Racks of replacement parts stood in neat rows—nitrogen cycler membranes, atmospheric processor filters, soil amendment cartridges. The unglamorous guts of a terraformed world.

He was pulling a cycler membrane from its rack when his comm chimed.

"Lukas." The voice belonged to Petra Voss—no. He shook his head. The voice belonged to colony director Nadira Khoury. Calm, measured, the way she always sounded, even when the news was bad. "Report to Operations immediately. All department leads."

"I'm at Grid Seven depot. Can it wait thirty—"

"It cannot wait."

The line cut. Lukas stared at the membrane in his hands, then set it back on the rack.

Operations was a circular building at the colony's center, its roof bristling with communication arrays and sensor clusters. By the time Lukas arrived, the other department leads were already filing in—Yara Fielding from Agriculture, whose name wasn't Fielding, he corrected himself mentally. Yara Osman from Agriculture. Dov Petras from Medical. Rina Castellan from—no. He stopped, breathed. Rina Vasik from Life Support. The faces were familiar, tight with the particular tension that came from being summoned without explanation.

Nadira Khoury stood at the central display, a holographic projection table that usually showed weather patterns and soil chemistry maps. Today it showed something different: a cone of light expanding from a point source roughly forty light-years away, rendered in angry red.

"At 03:47 this morning," Nadira said without preamble, "our long-range sensor array detected a gamma-ray burst originating from the collapse of a Wolf-Rayet star in the Cygnus sector. The burst is directional. It is aimed, within two degrees of arc, directly at this system."

The room went very quiet.

"Estimated time to arrival is nineteen days," Nadira continued. "The burst will deliver approximately ten thousand times the lethal radiation dose to any unshielded surface on this hemisphere. The atmosphere will not protect us. The habitats will not protect us. The agricultural domes will not protect us."

Dov Petras, a compact man with close-cropped gray hair, was the first to speak. "The bunker. The original landing bunker—"

"Was sealed and partially flooded six years ago when we expanded to the surface. It would take weeks to make it habitable again, and it was designed for a crew of twenty, not two hundred and three."

"Then what are you proposing?" Yara Osman asked, though her face said she already knew.

Nadira looked at each of them in turn. "Evacuation. The Perseverance can carry all personnel and critical supplies. Our destination will be Waystation Cygni, the depot station at Barnard's Reach, approximately four light-years from here. Transit time at maximum sustainable velocity: just under six years."

Six years. The number landed like a stone in Lukas's stomach. Six years in the transport's cramped quarters, with two hundred people and whatever they could carry. Six years, and then—what? A depot station built for resupply, not habitation. A way station, not a home.

"Everything we've built," Lukas said. He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

Nadira met his eyes. "Will be sterilized. Yes. The atmospheric processors, the soil beds, the clover fields—all of it. Forty-one years of work. Gone in a few hours of hard radiation." She paused. "I'm sorry, Lukas. I know what this place means to you. It means the same to all of us. But I will not trade two hundred lives for it."

No one argued. There was nothing to argue with.

The next three days were chaos.

Lukas had never seen the colony move so fast or with such desperate purpose. The Perseverance was designed for interstellar transit, but it had been sitting on its pad for over a decade, maintained but not actively crewed. Reactivating its systems was a massive undertaking—Henrik Bauer, the colony's propulsion specialist, practically lived inside the engine compartment, emerging only to eat and bark orders at his assistants.

Henrik was a tall, angular man from the German-speaking enclaves of the European Consortium, with a face that seemed designed for disapproval and a mind that could hold six engineering problems simultaneously. He and Lukas had worked together for years, a partnership built on mutual respect and a shared inability to leave a problem unsolved.

"The drive coils need recalibration," Henrik told Lukas on the second day, his voice hoarse from shouting over the noise of the engine bay. "I can get us to point-seven c, but the navigation system is running on decade-old star charts. We'll be flying half-blind."

"How half-blind?"

"Enough to add a year to the transit, maybe more. The depot station isn't exactly broadcasting a welcome beacon."

Lukas filed this away, one more problem in a cascade of problems. His own task was cargo logistics—deciding what to take and what to leave behind. Forty-one years of equipment, research data, biological samples, personal belongings, compressed into a ship designed for transit, not storage.

He worked eighteen-hour days, loading cargo modules with the grim efficiency of a man packing for a funeral. Seeds, soil samples, atmospheric data cores, medical supplies, fabrication templates. The things that would let them start over, somewhere, someday.

On the morning of day four—fifteen days to the burst—Lukas was in the remote equipment depot at Grid Seven, inventorying fabrication components for loading. The depot was three kilometers from the main colony, connected by a gravel road that wound along the base of the Spine. It was the farthest outpost, and the last on the loading schedule.

He was deep in the back of the building, behind racks of atmospheric processor parts, when the explosion happened.

Later, he would learn that a cargo module—one of the heavy-lift containers being loaded onto the Perseverance—had suffered a catastrophic pressure failure in its fuel cell array. The blast killed no one, by some miracle, but it damaged the ship's loading gantry, scattered debris across the landing field, and sent a shockwave rippling through the colony's power grid.

At Grid Seven, three kilometers away, Lukas felt the floor shake. Then the lights went out. Then a rack of atmospheric processor housings, each one weighing forty kilograms, toppled onto him.

The last thing he heard before the darkness was the sound of metal on metal, and then nothing at all.

---

He woke to silence.

Not the silence of a quiet room—the silence of absence. No hum of power conduits, no distant rumble of machinery, no murmur of voices on the comm. The depot's emergency lighting had kicked in, casting everything in a dim amber glow, and Lukas was lying on his back beneath a pile of processor housings with blood in his eyes and a headache that felt like his skull was trying to split open from the inside.

He moved his arms first. Then his legs. Nothing broken, though his left shoulder screamed when he tried to lift the housing off his chest. He worked himself free slowly, methodically, the way he'd been trained—assess, prioritize, act. The blood was from a gash above his left eyebrow, shallow but messy. He pressed a shop rag against it and sat up.

His wrist display was cracked but functional. The time read 14:37. He'd been unconscious for almost six hours.

Six hours.

He tried the comm. Static. He tried the depot's hardline terminal. Dead—the power grid surge had fried its relay. He tried his personal comm again, cycling through every channel.

Nothing.

Lukas stood, swaying, and walked to the depot's front door. He pushed it open and stepped outside into the afternoon light of Kepler-442b.

The sky was still blue. The engineered grass still rippled in the wind. The clover still smelled of clover.

But the landing pad, three kilometers to the south, was empty.

The Perseverance was gone.

He stared at the empty pad for a long time. The scorch marks from the ship's departure thrusters were still fresh, dark against the pale ferrocrete. The loading gantry was a twisted ruin, half-collapsed from the cargo module explosion. Debris littered the field—crates, equipment, personal belongings that hadn't made it aboard.

Lukas walked to the colony's central hub on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. Operations was dark, its door standing open. Inside, the holographic display was off, the consoles powered down. Someone had left a coffee cup on the director's desk, still half-full.

He checked the colony's network from the backup terminal in the server room, running on battery power. The personnel roster showed two hundred and two souls aboard the Perseverance, launched at 11:52 local time. One soul unaccounted for.

Lukas Solano. Status: presumed deceased.

He sat in the director's chair and stared at his own name on the screen for a very long time.

Then he pulled up the gamma-ray burst data. Fifteen days to impact. Fourteen now, accounting for the hours he'd lost.

The sky was still blue. The air still smelled of clover.

But the clock was running, and Lukas Solano was alone.