Monachopsis

"The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place." - Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

***

“Unity Five, Seilyr Ground Control, state your emergency, over!"

A few garbled words came back, although it seemed the shuttle was not receiving transmission.

“Unity Five, Seilyr, repeat, over."

There was no response. 

The controller, a middle-aged AISA flight engineer from Tyreca, tapped methodically at the array of touchscreens before him, opening up to receive messages on all frequencies. He leaned forward anxiously, nostrils flaring.

“Unity Five, Seilyr Ground Control, come in, over!"

Several of the Caprin flight controller's colleagues had taken notice by that point, and his supervisor hurried over to stand behind him.

“Unity Five appears to be in trouble, ma'am. She reported static discharge in the cabin, and had just declared emergency. I can't raise her, now. The locator beacon is not transmitting, either."

Switching his headset to the open speaker system, he repeated his call to the stricken shuttle.

A discordant buzz came back, and some indecipherable sounds that might have been a voice.

A sharp, electrical crack caused everyone listening to jump slightly, and the open channel with Unity Five went dead, replaced with white noise.

Instantly, the supervisor shut down all traffic to and from Seilyr, sounded the alarms, and called Cape Unity to arrange search and rescue teams.

*

Noah Myles whistled quietly to himself, spinning his car key around one finger casually as he walked, the other hand in his trouser pocket. After the video call he'd had with Rohanna the previous evening, the Caprin was in high spirits. In Cape Unity's parking garage, Noah's car sat beside Rohanna's, as always. He paused to look over the elegant, swooping lines of her classic sports coupe, and habitually checked to see that it was locked, before getting into his own much plainer electric self-driver.

“Home," he stated, clearly.

The car chimed, and the dash lit up with a flourish.

“Welcome, No-a Myles," said an electronic, female-coded voice. “Navigating to - Home. Enjoy your trip."

On a whim, Noah put on Rohanna's playlist. It really was god-awful, he thought, but it made him think of her and how defensive she was of the music his grandparents would've thought of as old-fashioned. Synth riffs and growling guitar solos accompanied heavy percussion and lyrics so cheesy they made him cringe, and smile at the same time. 

Within a few miles, he was dancing in the car as it hummed down the highway. He couldn't wait to see her. They'd been together for so long - friends since elementary school, lovers since college. And still, every time he saw her the room lit up. For a shy, nerdy little runt of a goat, Noah was genuinely not sure what he'd done to deserve such a goddess as Rohanna in his life.

Noah's car chimed again when it pulled into the garage of the modest duplex he shared with Rohanna, deep in the suburbs of Habury, and he headed inside. His slate was in his pocket, and his hand never far from it - just in case she 'accidentally' pocket-dialled him from Unity Five.

At Cape Unity, all hell was breaking loose.

*

The harsh, discordant cacophony of numerous cockpit alarms dragged Rohanna slowly back to consciousness. Darkness punctuated by angry, red, flashing lights filled her blurry vision as her eyes flared open, and she sucked in a panicked gasp. 

How long had she been out for?

There was a metallic taste in her mouth, and her head throbbed dully. There was blood on the side windshield frame where her temple had struck. Gingerly, Rohanna raised a hand to the side of her head. She winced, and her fingers came away red. Fumbling for her headset, which had flown across Unity Five's cabin, she sucked on her teeth to moisten her mouth. 

“Sei...Seilyr..." she coughed, once, violently. “Seilyr Ground Control, Unity Five, come in!"

Static.

As she regained some of her faculties, and a greater awareness of her situation, Rohanna began systematically working through the alarms that filled the shuttle's cabin. It seemed all of them had gone off. 

Resetting them one by one, she began rebooting systems. 

Saliel was still there, its bright silvery disc glinting from Seilyr's night-side oceans, far beneath. 

She hadn't been unconscious for long. Minutes, at most.

“Seilyr Ground Control, Unity Five, respond!"

Static.

By the time Rohanna's shuttle crossed the terminator line to the day side of Seilyr again, she was beginning to worry. All of her communication systems seemed to be down; she had no radio, no guidance, no remote trajectory - although some of the shuttle's on-board systems still seemed functional. 

Without communication with the ground, though, she couldn't hope to land on Seilyr.

Rohanna decided to continue in her orbit around Seilyr once more, to try and recapture some of the systems Unity Five relied on for external guidance. It seemed useless. And there was no way Rohanna could sustain manual flight for as long as it might take to get the lame bird working again.

“Seilyr Ground Control, I...don't know if you can hear me. If anyone can hear me. This is Unity Five broadcasting on all AISA frequencies, declaring emergency. I..."

Rohanna paused, with her finger on the transmit button. What was the point? No one could hear her. She lifted her finger from the button, and the constant fuzz of static returned to her headset. It would be a much longer, twenty hour trip back to Chrysalis at a near-constant velocity. The best she could hope for was to be detected by the spaceport and captured remotely. With that thought in mind, Rohanna aimed Unity Five at the opalescent bauble of Asantrea, and engaged the ion engines. 

*

Noah.

As soon as Unity Five had achieved transorbital velocity and she'd shut down the ion engines to conserve energy, Rohanna pulled out her slate. it was a long shot, but perhaps if she could patch it into the shuttle's onboard comms, she might be able to hook a satellite link outside of AISA's network and contact her lover. 

It was worth a try. But try as she might, she was met with the same silence as through any other communication attempt she'd made. There was no service. It was like she was in a bubble.

*

Chrysalis was nowhere to be seen. 

Rohanna checked and re-checked her calculations. Without automated trajectory guidance, she knew she was relying on her own acumen to even so much as locate the spaceport. 

But it should have been there.

Comms were still silent. Worse than silent, all Rohanna could hear was static. It was as if everyone else had disappeared, and she was the only one who remained.

Abruptly, a screen flickered to life on the shuttle's control deck, and Unity Five gave a proximity warning. 

“Debris field...?" Rohanna muttered, frowning at the fuzzy image. “What the fuck...?"

The proximity warning became a collision alert, seconds later. Something metallic pinged off the hull of the shuttle. Then again. Then a dozen more. Rohanna swore the air blue, and shoved the control stick forward and right, sending the shuttle into a stomach-wrenching spiral to escape the oncoming hail of debris. The shuttle was indicating a closing speed of close to five thousand miles an hour with some of the larger pieces, and Rohanna carefully positioned the spacecraft out of their path. 

The debris field, when it came into view, made Rohanna's blood run icy cold.

It was vast. A deadly smear of broken shards spread across the sky, glittering in the light of the binary stars. And there, at its core, was the shattered, bleeding carcass of Chrysalis.

“No... no no no, this isn't real... this can't be real… I'm dreaming, I must be dreaming…" The Dragonkin's mouth hung open in disbelief, and she pinched herself. Surely this was a nightmare. Hot, stinging tears floated free of her face in the near-zero gravity, and a sob wracked her body.

How could this have possibly happened? She'd been aboard Chrysalis less than two days previous. There had been thousands of souls aboard.

Her only consolation, as she looked upon the destruction, was that none of her family, nor Noah's family, had been aboard. Her mother was still on Seilyr, her father and Noah on Asantrea, at Cape Unity. But not knowing what had transpired was frustrating in the extreme. Maybe it had been a stellar storm, an electromagnetic shockwave? That might explain the violent behaviour of Unity Five on the far side of Seilyr. She had suggested as much to Seilyr Ground Control in one of her last communications with them, but they'd reported no abnormalities in stellar activity.

The only thing remaining was to attempt to land on Asantrea. Whether or not she'd make it to Cape Unity, Rohanna didn't know. Typically, returning shuttle missions from Chrysalis to Cape Unity were timed such that they entered the homeworld's atmosphere at a pre-determined heading and location, and were then guided in by a complex array of ground-based systems. The shuttle didn't carry nearly enough fuel to simply enter the atmosphere anywhere and fly around until a familiar landmark appeared. She'd have to be smarter than that. 

Fighting back a rising tide of fear, Rohanna took several slow, deep breaths to calm herself, deliberately orienting the shuttle to face away from the horror of Chrysalis. Everything had gone wrong. Everything. And on the one occasion where she had no backup on board the shuttle, either. Honing her anxiety into anger, she resolved to have some very strong words to say to whoever had put her on this damned shuttle alone. 

Unity Five sank into a low orbit around Asantrea, and the familiar pull of the planet's gravity against the ion cushion the shuttle rode upon was a comfort, Rohanna found. It was home, calling her back. So long as the shuttle's mechanical systems didn't fail - which they showed no signs of - she felt a surge of confidence that she could land it, at Cape Unity or elsewhere. It didn't matter, so long as she didn't come down in the middle of the Great Desert.

Finding familiar landmarks from a low orbit without augmented navigation was always going to be a challenge. The dense cloud cover and the angle of Rohanna's vision through the shuttle's thick-framed windshields was not conducive to visual wayfinding. 

Rohanna's ears perked to the sound of a friendly chime from the control deck, and her eye was drawn down to a small screen, set off to one side of the main controls like an afterthought. Lines of code skittered across its surface, and then...

“Oh you wonderful, fat-ass goose. Thank fuck..." Rohanna breathed, patting the padded top of the shuttle's control deck.

Something was working, at least. Something was speaking to her. GPS! It wasn't a satellite she recognised, but at that point, she'd have taken anything she was given. 

*

Unity Five was travelling east-north-east, at an altitude of three hundred miles over the Mare Viridium, some thousands of miles west of Cape Unity.

Rohanna eased back the ion cushion just a little, and felt the shuttle drop. She was relying on the unknown GPS satellite for a speed reading, and decided to err on the side of caution - it would be just her luck, at that stage, to come in too hot and break up on re-entry. 

*

At a hundred and fifty miles altitude, the shuttle was beginning to be buffeted by Asantrea's atmosphere. The ion drive wouldn't work much longer. Rohanna levelled off, and determined that the best way to return to the surface would be to drop into the atmosphere over the eastern coast of Valasea, only a couple hundred miles from her destination. Heavy cloud obscured the surface, and Rohanna's brow furrowed in concern. She was relying on an unfamiliar satellite to guide her in, and, importantly, she had no way of announcing her presence, or of receiving any warning of other traffic in the area.

There was no option, she had to forge on.

Committed to her descent, Rohanna slowed the shuttle, angled its nose downward, and then reached for the ion engines' master switch and powered them down.

Her stomach rose to her throat as the shuttle dropped, and she grunted, her harness the only thing keeping her in her seat. The atmo-jets seemed to take forever to power up. Rohanna watched her altimeter carefully as it spun wildly downward. Sweat beaded on her brow.

An alarm buzzed on the control panel. Only two of the three engines had engaged. The main engine, in the rear fuselage of the shuttle, had failed to deploy its ram intake. She tried it again, and the alarm repeated. Maybe it had been damaged by the debris field.

Two engines it was. She shut down the third, cutting its fuel supply.

The low, ascending roar of the jets spinning up was replaced at long last by the reassuring belch of ignition, and Rohanna began to slowly level Unity Five out. She was a little above fifty thousand, and beneath her was a featureless ocean of fuzzy white cloud.

Nervously, she tested what remained of the shuttle's onboard systems. Attitude indicator seemed to function. Altimeter, airspeed, hydraulics... Aside from the failed engine, Unity Five seemed perfectly flyable. The GPS indicated that she was somewhere over the western Mare Internum. It was now or never. Dipping the shuttle's nose, Rohanna descended gradually into the thick blanket of cloud. Raindrops skittered over the windshields. 

“Ground Control, Unity Five, come in, over."

Nothing but static, still. Rohanna widened her transmission frequency, and tried again. And again. No response.

Grimly, she refocused on the task at hand. All she had to do was set it down. Maybe a flyover of the spaceport first, to announce her presence and let any traffic be cleared. The GPS indicated that Cape Unity should be dead ahead, a hundred miles distant. Rohanna turned on all of the shuttle's external lights, both clearance and landing lights.

The shuttle didn't break through the cloud until three thousand feet, and Rohanna let out a deep sigh of relief. Trails of vapour streamed from Unity Five's wingtips, and Rohanna reached for the landing gear. It fell into place with a whine and a reassuringly solid clunk. What was less reassuring was the absence of the runway. It was nowhere to be seen. Below her, the lead-grey ocean stretched out into the distance, and the coast of Scordomna was some miles off to the north, off her left wing. Maybe the GPS was inaccurate. There was no time to recalculate her trajectory. The shuttle only had enough fuel to stay aloft for another thirty minutes. Gently, Rohanna banked it to the north, skimming the coastline. It looked... different. She was definitely in the right place. The familiar shape of the hills, and the unmistakable skyline of Habury some miles to the northeast confirmed that. So where the hell was Cape Unity?

From three thousand feet, Rohanna could see waves crashing over something in the ocean directly ahead of her. Something long, and artificially straight. Images flashed through her mind. The sharp jolt of the shuttle. The destruction of Chrysalis. The loss of communications. She double-checked her position against the GPS co-ordinates. Cape Unity should have been right below her, and there was no trace of it.

Panic rose in her mind, and her heart rate spiked. Was she losing her grip? She'd been at the controls of Unity Five for almost 36 hours by that stage. Surely she'd just overflown it, missed it in the poor visibility and her exhaustion. 

Gently, Rohanna increased the thrust to her jet engines, and banked inland, flying a gradual loop around the eastern fringe of the city of Habury. Surely someone would see her, and try to establish contact. Her eyes scanned the horizon, searching for anything familiar. With one eye on the shuttle's rapidly depleting fuel stores, she began preparing to set it down somewhere other than Cape Unity, if she couldn't find the strip. 

Her second pass revealed nothing new. She was definitely in the right place, but Cape Unity was simply...gone. 

A low-fuel alarm sounded, and Rohanna angrily reset it. Tears blurred her vision, although they were tears of exhaustion, frustration and anger more than anything else. She was angry at herself, angry at AISA administration, angry at... whatever it was that was playing with her perceptions of reality. She felt lost, out of place in a way she didn't even have the words to describe. So she externalised her fear, turned it into anger. How dare they put her and the shuttle in such a situation? If only she had a copilot, all of this might have been avoidable.

“No. Stop. Focus on what's real," she spoke aloud, addressing herself. “Forget all of that. You've got a wounded bird and no comms. Just. Land it. Find a strip, and put it down. Ask questions later. C'mon. You can do it."

She banked inland again, abandoning the thought of Cape Unity and heading towards Habury's commercial airport, instead. The strip there was only two miles long, but she could probably land the shuttle there safely enough.

And then, to the north of the city, a familiar sight. Familiar, but wrong. Orange lights strobed down the length of a strip of tarmac some miles away from the airport, that she didn't recall being there. She didn't have enough fuel for a flyover. One shot to land it. Steeling her nerves, Rohanna scanned the skies for any sign of other air traffic, and configured Unity Five for landing. 

Thirty. Twenty. Ten.

Her breath left her in a relieved sob when the shuttle touched down, coming to a graceful stop with a mile of runway to spare. Without any instructions to work from, she carefully taxied Unity Five away from the runway. 

With the immediate threat past, Rohanna felt her grip on reality wavering once again, and fear rose like bile in her throat. Ahead of her was a vast complex of buildings and hangars. Unfamiliar-seeming vehicles sped outward towards her, lights flashing, seeming not to have any physical contact with the tarmac beneath them. And there, emblazoned on the side of the nearest building, a hundred miles from where Cape Unity should have been, was a logo. A stylised, wedge-shaped spacecraft, with a swooping trail that encircled it. And beneath, in rounded, deliberately futuristic lettering; Asantrean International Space Agency.

*

Rohanna sat in the shuttle's cockpit, alone, injured, and completely confused. Her head throbbed, her hands shook, and she wrenched the top button of her flight suit open, gasping for breath. Sweat ran down her forehead, dripping into her eyes. Something was extremely wrong about everything she was experiencing, but she was not equipped to comprehend it.

Abruptly, her headset crackled, and came to life.

“Shuttle pilot, remain where you are! Power down your craft and remain on board. Respond, over."

The voice spoke in the universally recognisable language of aviation, but the accent was strange – immediately identifiable as Scordomnan, but different, subtly.

“Ground Control, this is Unity Five, what in the name of the Void is going on?!" Rohanna barked. “Where am I? What is this place? AISA has never had a base here, to my knowledge – would somebody care to fill me in?"

There was a long silence.

“Pilot, please repeat. Did you say... Unity Five?"

Rohanna's blood boiled. “Affirmative, you fucking dolt! Unity Five! Captain Rohanna de Rosa, AISA Cape Unity. What is it, your first day?!"

The long silence was repeated, and Rohanna angrily unclipped her harness. Hauling herself out of her chair, she kicked open the cockpit door and stormed back through the empty shuttle towards its bulky, airlocked door.

*

Jelah Sahel, Chief Spaceflight Officer, rushed into AISA Habury Ground Control, to where a cluster of personnel was crowded around a comms terminal. A sharply attired Equid woman, she oozed authority, and the crowd parted around her like a school of fish around a shark.

“Ma'am! It's... it's Unity Five," said the controller, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“Impossible, give me that," Sahel commanded, reaching for the controller's headset.

“...hello? Do you hear me? Would someone please fill me the fuck in?" A female voice blasted into Jelah Sanel's ear as she put on the headset, and adjusted her microphone.

“Pilot, clearly state your name, your rank, and your intentions."

A sharp snarl came down the headset. “Captain. Rohanna. De Rosa. Flight Engineer First Class, AISA Cape Unity. Seilyr Unity Program pilot. And who the fuck are you?!"

Sahel sat down heavily, and took a moment to compose herself. Both from the shock, and from the tirade of abuse that followed.

“Captain de Rosa, please!" She commanded, interrupting Rohanna's explosive rage. “I am Jelah Sahel, CSO AISA Habury. I don't know what you think you're playing at, but this is not amusing!"

“Not amusing? Not fucking amusing? Listen here, I may be disoriented and... more than likely concussed, but I know who I am! I lost all comms and external systems in a static discharge on rotation around Seilyr, 34 hours ago. I've got an empty bird, I'm flying solo, and it feels like I'm losing my grip on reality! Where's CSO Beachfield? I want to speak to him!"

Sahel frowned, and turned to her aide. “Beachfield?" She mouthed.

The aide checked something on his slate.

“CSO Cape Unity, 2146 until 2150, ma'am."

Colour drained from Sahel's muzzle, and she wrapped a hand around the microphone. “And de Rosa?"

“She was the Captain of Unity Five in 2148. Solo flight. Empty bird."

“Gods have mercy," Sahel murmured, and then, to Rohanna; “Captain de Rosa, I apologise. I needed to be certain. Please remain on board, do not open the airlock."

“Would you at least do me the decency to tell me what the fuck is happening? I... I don't even know... where I am," Rohanna's voice slurred, moving from visceral rage to fear, and inside the shuttle she gripped the bulkhead to steady herself as a sudden wave of nausea washed over her. 

“Captain, try to remain calm. You've been through a lot, that much is clear. How... long was your flight, if I may ask?" Sahel asked, studying the AISA mission logs her aide handed her.

“Flight manifest says thirty-six hours, twelve minutes."

“I see. That's a lot longer than expected, isn't it? The journey from Seilyr to Asantrea on a Pelican shuttle should only be twelve or so hours, correct?"

Rohanna snarled. “Lady, I just flew this bird all the way from fucking Seilyr on manual controls. All external guidance systems were down. I was never going to risk ion-grav flight the whole way without it. On that note, NOW the radio works? What gives, I've been transmitting on all frequencies throughout the flight, trying to get a response out of someone! It's as if the entire world had just disappeared. I only found this strip by sheer chance, and was only in the ballpark because I got pinged by a GPS sat!"

Sahel took a deep breath, and glanced around the control room. “Captain, all of our systems are fully operational. There has been no system failure on our end. We simply did not expect to receive transmissions on your frequency."

Rohanna kicked the inside of the shuttle door. “How is that even possible? Would you just cut to the chase and debrief me?!"

“Not yet, my dear. Stay calm. A team is coming to retrieve you. They'll be in full bio-suits, don't be alarmed. You'll be transported into a quarantine room here on the base, and we'll begin to fill in some blanks from there."

“Arahan's sweaty fucking nutsack, I am at my limits here."

“Have patience, Rohanna. And... Welcome home."

*

After ten excruciating minutes, during which time Rohanna paced restlessly up and down the shuttle's empty cabin, she finally heard the familiar sound of a stair-truck contacting the hull of Unity Five. Three heavy knocks on the shuttle door, and Rohanna entered her codes, and turned the heavy lever that would unseal the craft. Her ears popped as the pressure equalised, and the door swung ponderously inward to reveal two biosecurity personnel in full apparatus, and beyond them, a sealed and windowless tunnel.

“Captain de Rosa?"

“No, I'm your fucking mother."

“Come with us, please?"

“Do I have a choice?"

“Unfortunately not, ma'am. This is... unprecedented, to say the least. Come, we need to get you into quarantine, and then some things can be made clearer, for all of us."

Rohanna tilted her head and cast a critical eye up and down the two suited personnel. Their accents were strange, like the voice from the control centre, and they spoke haltingly. It was almost as if Scordomnan wasn't their first language. She turned, and took one last look around the inside of Unity Five. As glad as she was to be disembarking, something deep inside her told her that this would be the last time she saw it.

*

The tunnel was very temporary, obviously thrown together in a hurry from some kind of accordioned vinyl like the join in the centre of an articulated bus. It was pressurised, even if only slightly, and formed a sealed passageway between Unity Five and the open door of a vehicle at the other end. It, too, was windowless, and felt very much like a prison van. Rohanna stepped inside and sat down, with a suited-up biosecurity agent on either side of her.

“What's this about?" she asked, tiredly.

“I'm not at liberty to say, ma'am. I'm sorry."

Rohanna lapsed into silence, and bowed her head. It felt as though she'd landed on the wrong planet. Nothing was making any sense, and it felt beyond her capability to work out. So much of what she was seeing was eminently familiar, just... different. The structure of AISA management seemed the same, but the names had changed. The spaceport she'd landed at was familiar, but a hundred miles from where it was meant to be. And where was Noah? Was he here? She forced herself not to think of him, that would surely push her over the edge if he had... changed. Her mind travelled back to the event that she was coming to realise was probably catalytic to all of this. She'd lost consciousness only for a minute, maybe two, just after passing the terminator line onto the night-side of Seilyr and hitting her head on the window frame of the shuttle – not even long enough to miss the sight of Saliel rising above the horizon. But it had been in those brief moments that everything had become disjointed. She realised that there had been no radio contact, no contact of any kind, in fact, between that moment and her landing at this unfamiliar spaceport.

She'd read plenty of science-fiction in her youth, of course – intrepid space explorers pushing the limits of what was known, and what was possible. It seemed to her now that she'd fallen into one of those narratives, and was grasping desperately in the darkness of her ignorance for some kind of a point of reference from which to judge her position, literally or metaphysically.

Rohanna jolted back to the present when she felt the vehicle lift slightly, before moving away from Unity Five. It was near silent, and clinically clean. There were no bumps or jolts from the ground below, and Rohanna had the distinct feeling that it was technology she had not encountered before. Like an ion cushion, but… within the atmosphere? Impossible, at least in her reality. The journey was short, and when the door opened, Rohanna was greeted by another tunnel just the same as the one outside the shuttle, which led into a more solid structure.

Tentatively, she walked forward, and into a comfortable, but sparingly furnished room. Everything was gleaming white, accented with brushed steel and dark woodgrain veneer. Ambient lights adjusted to her presence automatically from hidden recesses around the corners of the ceiling, and she felt a gentle airconditioned breeze on her face.

“Hey! What about my slate? I need to call my partner. And my parents," she called, turning towards the retreating biosecurity agents.

“I am sorry, Rohanna, that simply will not be possible just yet."

Rohanna spun around. Behind her, on the other side of a glass wall, stood an Equid woman whose voice she recognised as being that of Jelah Sahel. Behind her, the same décor continued, terminating at a dark veneered door. 

“You're... CSO Sahel, you said - where the hell is Beachfield? Why could I not find Cape Unity? Chrysalis? What happened to fucking Chrysalis? This is beyond a joke now. I need to know what's happening, this is making no sense at all and I am at the end of my sanity!" The words tumbled out of Rohanna before she could check them. To her credit, Sahel remained calm – empathetic, almost, in the way she nodded and maintained eye contact with Rohanna.

“I understand your confusion. You have every right to feel confused. Rohanna, all of what you have seen today has been very real. I want you to know straight away that you are not, as you say, losing your grip. We are unsure what has happened to bring you here to us, but I assure you we will not spare any effort to discover why, and how."

Rohanna tilted her head quizzically, and frowned. “Elaborate."

Sahel produced a slate that looked as though it had been buried for a century, and fumbled with it until text appeared on its screen. “You were scheduled to fly passengers and freight from Chrysalis to Seilyr aboard Unity Five, and then to return solo, one day later. Correct?

“Yes. How do you not know this?"

“My dear, there is no simple or succinct way to say this to you."

Rohanna grit her teeth. “Then just fucking say it. Give me something to understand."

Sahel took a deep breath, as though bracing herself for what she was about to say.

“You are at AISA Habury – that you already know. You departed AISA Cape Unity on the twelfth day of the sixth month, 2148. Today is the tenth day, of the fourth month, of the year 2410. You, and Unity Five, have been missing without a trace for two hundred sixty-two years."

*

Asantrean International Space Agency, Habury Spaceport, 2410.

“Fill me in, what do we know?" Jelah Sahel said from behind her desk, as a stream of engineers, administrators and physicists entered her office.

“Ma'am, everything Captain de Rosa has said can be verified," Lead Engineer Tharan Sonels said. “The shuttle is indeed Unity Five. Its onboard diagnostics are archaic, it took us some time even to patch into them with our systems. It has suffered significant electrical damage, some kind of massive discharge that burned out all the guidance systems. Some data was recoverable though; including pilot inputs, system failure alerts, and some voice recordings."

Tharan paused, and then continued. “I... can also claim something of a link to Captain De Rosa. My grandfather's grandfather, Story Sonels, was on Unity Five for that last flight to Seilyr. It was his first trip to Seilyr. The shuttle's disappearance became something of a legend in our family; if that flight had been the following day, my family would simply not exist."

Sahel processed that information, leaning back in her chair with her fingers peaked in front of her muzzle. “Hmm. Would you be willing to meet with her personally, Sonels? Given that you have that familial connection. She is almost three centuries out of her time, she's going to need all the support she can get to regain some of her bearings."

“I'd be happy to try, ma'am."

“Good," Sahel turned from him to the head of the physics department. “Do you have any idea what happened, and how?"

“We've analysed the shuttle's systems, ma'am," began Benji Hayn, a slender Dragonkin, squinting through the thick lenses of his glasses. “The massive electrostatic discharge seems to have been external in origin, although there was no stellar storm activity recorded from Aror at the time. And the shuttle was on the far side of Seilyr at the time of the...event... so we must exclude it as a possibility. The best we can come up with is only theoretical."

“It's better than nothing, Hayn."

“Yes... well... it appears Unity Five flew directly into a time vortex," he said, tilting his head as if even proposing such a thing went against everything he knew. “Our knowledge of wormholes at the time was nebulous, but it seems to be that a ripple in the fabric of space time momentarily forged an anomalous bridge, at the precise moment of Unity Five's presence. The odds of that occurring are..."

“Astronomical."

“To say the very least. One in a hundred trillion, perhaps. We can prove, theoretically at least, the existence of such a ripple. But this is the first time we've ever had any indication that they can influence physical matter above a subatomic level."

“What are the implications?"

“Well... clearly, no time at all passed for de Rosa, while centuries elapsed for us. That differential in the passage of relative time is difficult to explain even if Unity Five experienced several decades of light-speed travel, but... she has no recollection of that, does she? And the Pelican shuttles used during the Seilyr Unity Program were not capable of anything greater than around two-percent light speed." Hayn looked up, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his muzzle.

“No, that's correct. She says she was knocked out by the violence of the event for only a minute, maybe two. Someone definitely would have noticed if it were much longer."

“What is stranger still, ma'am, is the exterior of Unity Five. Our tracking systems picked it up by its radiation signature long before we had any inkling of what it was – that is how we managed to clear traffic from around the spaceport and Habury Airport in plenty of time. De Rosa herself, and the interior of the shuttle, are in perfect shape. But the exterior looks and reads like a spacecraft that has been in ex-orbital space for many decades. It's a miracle that the atmo-jets ignited at all, after such a protracted period of exposure to background radiation."

Sahel processed that information slowly, 

“So... a lone pilot, in an empty shuttle. That should never have happened to begin with, but I don't see how it would've changed events had there been anyone else present. She launches as normal, a routine mission, and... what, was in freefall rotation around Seilyr?"

“That appears to be correct, ma'am," Sonels confirmed.

“That alone is archaic," Sahel said. “And on the far side, an event took place in which moments passed for de Rosa, while twenty-six decades passed for us, and for the exterior of Unity Five. That explains the fruitless search and rescue missions, at the very least. One mystery solved, a hundred new ones open. If the shuttle has aged coherently with the passage of time here on Asantrea, where has it been? And what of Rohanna's… De Rosa's… partner, she mentioned a partner? Does she have any living descendants or relatives?"

“Noah Myles, ma'am," replied Sabar Vint, head of personnel. “They were never married, but a legal couple. Her estate was split between him and her parents in 2150. We searched for next of kin – Rohanna had a brother, who has living descendants in Rhocarn. We're searching for them now. Of… greater interest, perhaps, is Noah Myles himself. He never married or entered a civil union again, nor did he have any children that we're aware of."

Sahel took a deep breath, and paused, visibly suppressing a surge of emotion. “He was waiting for her."

“It seems he was, ma'am. He lived until he was a hundred and six. Towards the end of his life, he volunteered for an experimental program, seeking to upload his consciousness into an early Synth unit."

“The poor bastard. Alright. Did the upload succeed? Does the unit still exist?"

“I will confirm, ma'am," said Vint, with a curt nod. 

“Alright. Dismissed. I need time to work this out. Shut the door behind you, Hayn."

Once alone in her office, Jelah Sahel's shoulders slumped. Rohanna's disappearance had dropped a hand grenade into the Seilyr Unity Program. Unity Five had been the first spacecraft AISA had lost in over a century, and they had properly lost it. Not a trace of it had ever been recovered, and now... two hundred sixty-two years on, it had simply emerged from the rain clouds, and touched down as though nothing had changed. 

Except everything had changed. 

Overwhelmed, Jelah Sahel wept.

*