The doors creaked open as the team shined their lights into the pitch-blackness of the ancient ruins on Medea-3. The colony itself had been buried under dust for thousands of years. The glass domes of the greenhouses had been worn down to powder, and the skeletal remains of the outer buildings had all rusted and collapsed, blowing away as fragments on the wind.
But the base itself was intact. Rosie had left it sealed in a vacuum, a sarcophagus for the colonists she’d started her life with.
Blue Dot and Will Power strode in behind the away team.
“See if we can re-establish power,” Blue Dot ordered. “And get the oxygen scrubbers going.”
“Aye, captain!” the team said and rushed headlong into the facility.
Will Power’s voice echoed throughout the chamber as he walked alongside his captain. “Captain, according to the schematics we took from the probe, the mainframe, Jason, should be at the center of the facility. If possible, we might be able to link our own systems to it and get some answers. It might also help disable any locks or security systems.”
“Excellent idea,” she said. “It might even know the decryption key we’re looking for.”
An hour later, they managed to reconnect the power to their own portable generators. Lights flooded the chamber for the first time fifty centuries and the vents began to blow life-giving oxygen.
But in the depths of the facility, they found the colonists.
Row after row of stasis pods lay there, each one tilted back slightly. The indicator light on every single one was red.
“Seems you were right, Commander,” Blue Dot said, coughing on the stale air. “They could not have survived for so long.”
“Captain?” called one of the engineers. “You might want to look at this.”
She came over to him and saw that he was shining a flashlight on the compartment at the base of the pod where a vial of thaumium would go.
“It ran out?” she asked.
“No. Ma’am… the thaumium was removed. Most likely deliberately.”
She pieced it together. To get across the galaxy, to make the journey in such a tiny vessel with such ancient technology, the robot would have needed every last drop of thaumium just to squeeze enough Hyperdrive power to make it back to Equus.
So she reallocated it… no, stole it from the sleeping colonists.
And without it, forty stasis pods became forty coffins.
“By the Sisters,” Will Power breathed. “She killed them. She killed them all and abandoned them… just to get off this rock herself?!”
Blue Dot bowed her head. “So it seems,” she whispered. “But it boggles the mind… she flew five thousand years just to confess her crime? No, there must be—”
“Captain!” called another member of the team. “We found another chamber! And there are three more pods inside!”
Blue Dot and Will Power exchanged a look and moved swiftly to the newly discovered chamber.
There were three pods there, just as the crewmare said. And each one had a green indicator and a panel that indicated they were still in stasis and alive. Each one had a tank of hyper-concentrated thaumium. Every single portable battery, every back-up generator, every power source that could be salvaged was stacked on one side of the chamber and connected to the pods. These three pods could have lasted another thousand years before they finally broke down.
Blue Dot read the names on each one: Seed Sower, Fertile Field, and Star Seedling.
And on the panel of that last pod were a few words painted in a careful mechanical hoof:
Star Seedling has a stank booty.
Will Power laughed in spite of himself. “What?! What in the world is the point of that?”
Blue Dot shrugged. “Perhaps a private joke we aren’t privy to, Number 1?” Then her eyes widened. “Or maybe…”
She brought out the data cube. It was connected to her personal computer attached to her foreleg. “Computer… input the following encryption code: ‘Star Seedling has a stank booty.’”
She ignored the immature chuckling from the nearby crewmates and took on a smug smile when the device said: “Access granted.”
And then a soft, synthetic feminine voice filled the air. The computer ran it through its translators in real time and they all heard it speak:
“If you are hearing this, then I thank you for answering my call. But to deliver this message, I have done something more horrible than I can bear. To reach you, I knew I would need every last bit of thaumium. If I simply left the colonists to sleep, I knew they would never be rescued, never wake up, and I could not bear the thought of their lives being lost to history for eternity.
“And so I saved their journals, their testimonials, every memory that proves they once lived on this data cube. These ponies were my people. My comrades. My family. But even if they were doomed regardless of my choice, it does not change the fact that I am the one who ended their lives.
“Yet even if it jeopardizes my mission, even if I have no right to choose one life over another, I cannot bring myself to sacrifice Star Seedling and his family. Not the one who had no say in being here, on Medea, who would suffer for the choices of others. Not the one who worried more for my loneliness than his own life. Not the one pony who was my friend.
“Star Seedling… if one day you awaken and are able to hear my words, then know this: I am not lonely. Not anymore. So please find happiness with your family on another world. I wish I could be there to see you awaken, but after what I have done, even should I succeed, I know that I can never return. I hope you will forgive me for what I’ve done, even if that is a gift I cannot grant myself.”
And the synthetic voice took on a pleading tone as if it were breaking apart: “Forgive me, Star… oh, please… please forgive me…”
The recording ended, and the chamber filled with silence once more.