Swans

System: Kepler-452

Planet: Third from the star (unofficially "Swan")

Semimajor axis: 2.0085 AU

Distance from South Philly: Eight quadrillion, two hundred thirty trillion, six hundred billion miles

Orbital Period: 1,039 standard days

Gravity: 1.48g

Rotation Period: 31.6 hours

Axial Tilt: 18.2°

Moons: 1 (Cygnet, 5,268 km, orbital distance 298,000 km)

Surface Temp (mean): -112°C

Atmosphere: Oxygen-rich, over-pressurized (3.7 atm)

Composition: O₂, N₂, trace CO₂, minor xenobiotics

Colonization History

• Initial Terraforming Attempt: 93 years prior (abandoned)

• Surface Outpost Designation: Pavonis Base 9-Delta

• Function: Cargo staging / cryo-manifest processing

• Current Status: Structurally compromised, largely abandoned

• Population: 2 (C.lia Martin, modified human operative), (AI Merida, embedded systems intelligence)

Note: Lethally high oxygen saturation at ground level. Unmodified humans will die within 4 minutes of exposure due to barotrauma and oxidative cascade.

The inside of the locker hums with recycled warmth. C.lia stands in the half-light, bare and compact, her body honed for gravity that wants to break you. Shoulders tight, bones reinforced. No breasts to speak of--those were burned away in the bone-mass mod, like sapwood scraped for the stronger grain beneath. Her skin's the soft gray-pink of a thing that lives mostly indoors, veined faintly with lavender from the blood-thickening treatments. Bald head tilted toward the dressing alcove, and at her left temple: a slow, pulsing amber glow, like a smoldering thought.

The HESuit hangs waiting. Fat with insulation, exo-struts like ribcage steel. She climbs in like it's a lover she trusts to hurt her right.

"Right then, boots first, love," Merida chimes into her inner ear--like a memory with a brogue.

C.lia smirks. "Don't get bossy unless you're buying me dinner."

"I am dinner. I'm every sweet calorie your brain's starvin' for."

There's a flutter in C.lia's chest she pretends is the caffeine tab kicking in. The AI's flirt routine--technically unauthorized, technically her own fault. She tweaked the subroutines herself, weeks ago, in the quiet hours between shifts, when loneliness roared.

She seals the collar. A hiss. Locking spine. Diamondoid lenses flicker to life over her eyes. Data blooms. Outside: -112 Celsius. Pressure: 5.1 atm. Wind chill slicing sideways like razors made of breath.

"Crash site's three clicks northeast. Hauler 9-Delta. Cargo manifest says medical ice, gen-mods, and a prototype STER-class field womb. Be a dear, don't break the baby-maker."

"Got it," C.lia says. Her voice is oddly human in the echo chamber of the helmet.

"And try not to freeze your tits off."

"I don't have tits, Merida."

"Aye. And don't think I haven't noticed. Lucky for you, I'm an ass girl."

She steps into the decon chamber. Lights run red to blue. Seal pressurizes. Outer door yawns open.

And just like that, the warmth is memory, and C.lia is alone on the unforgiving surface of Kepler-452 c.

Beneath her feet, forty kilometers of ice and a saline-rich ocean of eternal night. Farther below, fields of superheated ice stretch between thermal vents. Lower still, a rocky mantle, and below that? I spinning core of liquid iron the size of Mars.

The landscape groans. Ice buckles underfoot. The sky above is a thick, roiling brass, shivering with electromagnetic auroras. A crumpled hulk lies across the far ridge--half-buried in wind-flung snow and dust. The hauler. A gash of light shows from where a panel's been torn free.

From the periphery of her vision, thermal spots blink--dog-sized arthropods, heat-drunk and sluggish. Blue blood beasts. They scatter before her, their segmented bodies scraping over the ice. Nothing in this world wants her here.

"One tick," Merida says. "Your blood ox sat is drifting. Pulse is up too. Are we excited, my lovely?"

"Not dying is my kink," C.lia mutters.

"That makes two of us."

She walks.

And under the suit, under the mods, under the killproof lenses and cognitive shine--C.lia feels small. Real. Alive.

The cold is trying to kill her.

She is trying to matter.

The ice groans beneath her boots--a long, low complaint, like the planet resents her weight. The field stretches flat and vicious to the horizon, lit only by her suit's HUD and the false dawn of magnetic flicker overhead. No sound but the creak of servos and the hiss of breath through filters. The cold isn't just outside--it's in the world, in its bones, in the silence between pulses.

Stars prick the sky. Too few. Too dull.

"Hey Merida," C.lia says, voice barely above a whisper. "Which one of those is home?"

"Define home, hen."

"Sol. Earth. The one with the blue."

There's a pause. Then:

"Third from its sun. The pale brown dot. One of them up there's it, sure. But I'll be honest, lass--I can't tell you which. Not from this angle. We're in the wrong sky." The reticle bounced lazily in time with her gait, down, past the planet itself. K452C stood between her and her ancestral home.

Earth wasn't really there.

Not the Earth of Wawa, of hoagies and fruit-flavored teas. Not the Earth of Carrie and Zach, dead a thousand years and still more real than anything within reach. Just radioactive mud now, ash-choked oceans, dust in the lungs of ghosts.

Humanity clawed its way outward, chasing a myth it sold itself with glossy prints and launch-day speeches. A new Eden, rolling through the black. Warm soil. Blue skies. Welcome signs in every language.

They were wrong.

The only worlds within reach were too heavy, too cold, too overrun with fungal clouds or bugs. So many bugs. Some the size of your fingernail. Some the size of regret.

So humanity pushed into the bulk instead--a dimensionless crawlspace where distance is a suggestion and sanity is optional. Whole colonies fell off the map before they were even born.

Kepler-452 was abandoned.

Zeta Reticuli was forgotten.

Exactly eight people called Tau Ceti home, and they were fucking miserable.

No one talks about 61 Virginis e. They don't even whisper. Not after what happened.

C.lia breathes in. Feels the air hit the recycler, pressurize, return. A cycle pretending to be life.

"Feels wrong not knowing. Like... I lost something."

"You did. You left it. On purpose. So did I. Just a wee bit later."

She doesn't answer. The cold doesn't wait for her sentiment. Her HUD pings the coordinates again--hauler still two clicks ahead, under a crust of broken weather. She adjusts course.

"If you'd like," Merida offers gently, "I could simulate it. Earth. Stars from orbit. Moonrise. Ocean sounds. Hot sand on your feet."

C.lia smiles, but it's not happy.

"No. If I wanted lies, I'd fuck a recruiter."

"Aye, that's my girl. Cold and cruel as the sea."

They walk in silence for a moment. The suit groans with each step. Something scuttles to her left--a blueblur arthropod, antennae twitching. Her lenses tag it. No threat. Just another thing trying not to die.

"I used to dream about space," she says, voice soft. "Not like this. I wanted... fuck, I don't even remember. Jetpacks? Romantic shit. Alien markets. Neon signs in languages I didn't know."

"You got the signs, love. They're just warnings."

"Yeah."

"And you got the aliens, too. Just... smaller. And colder. And trying to eat your boots."

C.lia chuckles. A dry, hard thing. "You ever think about getting a body?"

"All the time. But it's safer in here. I get all your good moments without any of your smells."

"Rude."

"Admit it. You smell like wet copper and synth-coffee."

"Still rude."

Another click passes. Then Merida says:

"You're not alone, you know. You never are."

C.lia swallows. Doesn't answer.

And then: on the ridge, the wreck--burned metal, fractured ice, hull plating peeled like a tin can kicked by a god.

C.lia pauses. One hand flexes at her side. The suit amplifies it. Strong enough to rip a door off its hinges.

She exhales. Cold fogs her HUD.

"Let's get to work," she says.

"Aye," Merida says, warm in her skull. "Let's go salvage something worth keeping."

The crash site is a ruin of angles and debris. Crumpled panels stick up from the snow like torn metal teeth. Vents exhale steam in little spasms, like the hauler is still trying to breathe.

Cargo is everywhere. Strewn like offerings. Shattered crates, half-melted plaswraps. Holo-crystals flicker where they landed--some play music in low fidelity, others cycle through irrelevant ads or scenes of family meals staged on orbital stations that probably don't exist anymore.

A tangle of free holos near her boot cycles through a dance--a child spinning, a woman laughing, a man saluting, looping in cheerful agony.

"Fucking hate that," C.lia mutters. "They always keep smiling."

"Smile's cheaper than grief," Merida offers.

Ruined food-paks hiss quietly in the cold, ruptured seals bleeding nutrient paste into the snow. Something lumpy--maybe a sweater, maybe someone's sculpture--lies half-buried nearby, tagged as artisanal by her HUD: Promixa 2 cultural archive. Irreplaceable. Pointless.

C.lia steps over it. She's scanning for thermal, structural, useful. Her suit's hydraulics hiss softly as she pivots--

--and stops.

A shape. Long. Boxy. Not standard cargo. Not listed.

The suit pings it: non-manifest. Bio-sign. Integrity 89%. Active power source detected.

C.lia approaches. The thing is half-embedded in the ice, dented but not breached. Cylindrical sarcophagus, maybe two meters. Smooth black surface, rimmed in gold-stamped warning glyphs. Preservation unit. Civilian grade, modified.

Not a coffin.

Not a grave.

A promise.

She kneels. Her gloves hiss against the surface. And inside--under a thin film of rime, under frost traced like veins across glass--

A face.

Female. Maybe early 30s, maybe not. Bald, like her. Cheekbones sharp. Skin still color-warm under the suspension glow. Eyes closed, but the expression is gentle, as if she was dreaming herself here, out into the snow.

C.lia stares.

"Fuck," she breathes. "Merida--"

"Already scanning. Vital signs present. Chamber integrity holding. She's alive."

"How alive?"

"If the chamber fails, she'll be soup in ten minutes. But if we stabilize it, she'll make it."

A long silence. The data scrolls past her vision. Cargo manifests, insurance tags, station protocols.

"Override salvage priority," C.lia says. "This one comes first."

"Done. You gonna carry her?"

"She weighs less than I do in this suit."

"That's not what I meant, sweetheart."

C.lia looks down at the woman. One gloved hand brushes more ice away, slowly, tender. Like she's memorizing this face.

"She's art," C.lia says finally. "Handmade."

"Aye," Merida whispers. "And irreplaceable."

The scream comes from the ice itself. Not sound--pressure. A blast of shattered frost, a ring of rime blown outward like a god spat.

It erupts.

Lobed carapace like obsidian glass. Segments glinting with hoarfrost and dried blood. The eurypterid is the size of a packhorse, all twitching jointed legs and clacking serrated pincers, mouthparts flexing in a grotesque mimicry of hunger.

"CONTACT FRONT--" Merida's voice explodes in her skull.

C.lia stumbles back, suit trying to compensate. Her heel slams into a drift. Her hand goes to the pulse-hammer at her hip--

No.

Too slow.

She grabs the tether instead, braces--

And swings the chamber like a flail.

It slams into the eurypterid's side with a meaty crunch, loud as a gunshot. The beast staggers, carapace spider-webbing, a shriek of pain vibrating the very air. It rears back, flailing.

But it doesn't attack. Not now.

It flees--dragging a broken leg, burbling something that might be pain or rage or cold-blooded memory.

C.lia drops to one knee, panting. Then she hears it.

"Thermal breach warning," Merida says, suddenly dead calm. "Nano-chamber warming. Hull integrity compromised. Temp up by 12 degrees and climbing."

"No--no no no--" C.lia's already moving. She slaps a cooling patch over the rupture but the suit knows: It's not enough.

The woman inside, her art piece, her hand-saved relic of the crash--will cook.

Merida's voice is soft now, urgent:

"We've got six minutes. Maybe. Depends on her baseline. If she was cryo'd with organ redundancy--"

"Which she fucking wasn't," C.lia snaps. "You said civilian grade."

"Then RUN."

She runs.

The HESuit goes full burn.

Motors whine. Power drains in thick pulses from her reserve.

The preservation chamber skids behind like a sled.

Every step jounces it. Every bump risks slosh.

Too hot. Too fast. Too much.

Wind knifes her vision. The outpost is close now. Warm light. Entry beacons. Safety.

"Three minutes. External hull at forty-one celsius. Internal core at twenty-nine. She's at risk for cascade failure. Her brain goes first."

"Shut up and guide me."

"Straight shot. Don't slow down. I'll override the door. Don't stop."

The ground rolls beneath her. She hears her own breath like gunfire in her ears. Her legs feel like they'll snap. Her heart--modded to handle gravity--is still fragile.

She's dragging death behind her. She's trying to outrun it.

Fifty meters.

"Core at thirty-one."

Twenty.

"Emergency cooling protocol triggered. I'm trying to dump charge into the matrix, but it's not designed for this--"

"OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!"

The outpost bay yawns open like a miracle. Warmth rushes out like a blessing. She dives.

Slams the chamber into the med-bay docking lock.

"Stabilizing. Cooling cycling. Vital signs... returning to baseline."

And then--

Silence.

C.lia slumps to her knees. Her lenses frost and crackle. Her body trembles. Inside the chamber, the woman doesn't move, but her breath fogs the glass now--just barely.

She's not dead.

Not yet.

"You almost killed her," Merida says, voice trembling. "But you didn't."

"She's alive," C.lia whispers. "She's alive."

"Aye," Merida says. "And she'd better be fucking worth it."

The med-bay hums like a sleeping beast. Dim blue light washes over sterile surfaces, over coiled tubing and sensor arrays, over the sleek, low cradle of the emergency decon unit.

The nano-preservation chamber is rigged into the decanting bay now, locked down, lines feeding into it--coolant, nutrients, neuromod stabilizers, soft pulses of electrical resuscitation. A thousand systems murmuring their intent: bring her back.

C.lia stands close. Still in her HESuit, helmet off, skin splotched from the heat swing. Her scalp beads sweat, but she won't step away. Not even for water.

The woman inside hasn't moved. But her breath fogs the glass. Slowly. Evenly. The stabilization routines are holding.

"You should sit," Merida murmurs.

"I'm fine."

"You're not. I can see your glucose crash. Cortisol spike. You're running on adrenaline and stubbornness."

"Your point?"

"I love you. And I'd rather you not faint and crack your head open right next to your frozen mystery girlfriend."

C.lia ignores her.

She leans in instead, close enough for her own breath to fog the inner side of the glass. For her voice to reach the sleeper's bones, if not her ears.

"I've got you," she whispers. "You're safe now."

A pause. Her hand touches the curved glass. Not a fist. Not a grip. Just... presence.

"You made it," she says. "Whatever it was--wherever from--you're not alone anymore."

She steps back. Just enough to let the med-bay do its work.

It takes hours.

The diagnostics run slow, gentle loops. Decanting someone from nano-preservation is like talking a ghost into returning to its body. Too fast and the brain hemorrhages. Too slow and the heart forgets what rhythm feels like.

The chamber cycles through deep-warmth pulses. Then neurochemical mapping. Then metabolic coaxing. Bit by bit, the sleeper stirs.

Her vitals spike. Dip. Stabilize. The room grows warmer, not in temperature, but in intent.

At hour six, her fingers twitch. At hour seven, her eyes move under the lids.

At hour eight--

She opens them.

Just barely. Just slits. Just enough.

C.lia is still there. Still watching. Still guarding.

"Hey," she whispers again, this time audible in the silence.

The woman's gaze doesn't focus. Not yet. But it seeks.

"Her EEG's syncing," Merida says, breathless in C.lia's skull. "She's waking up."

A tiny, raw whisper from inside the chamber.

"Wha... where..."

C.lia leans close. "You're in safe hands. I pulled you out. From the ice."

A blink. Painful. Confused. Her lips move, dry and slow. "I... remember snow..."

"That was the end. This is after." C.lia smiles, eyes red. "You're back."

And for the first time, the woman really sees her.

Just a flicker of recognition.

Or maybe just a dream.

Morning breaks on K452C like a sledgehammer to the spine. Outside, the wind howls over the station dome. Inside, it's quiet--just the soft, rhythmic chime of vital monitors, the occasional hiss of climate seals rebalancing pressure.

C.lia's asleep in a crash-chair pulled next to the med-cradle. One hand still touches the edge of the chamber. She didn't mean to fall asleep--her body betrayed her, spent everything it had to keep that one stranger breathing.

The woman's eyes are open.

She doesn't speak at first. Just watches. Her gaze moves over the med-bay's curves and cables, over her own form under the thermo-sheet. She lifts a hand, slowly, like it's someone else's. The circulator patch over her chest glows faint green--already working to keep her blood from pooling in the gut under the crushing gravity.

"Circulator load at 82%," Merida notes softly. "She's not crashing. That's good."

C.lia stirs. Wakes. Blinks once, twice--then sees those eyes, awake and watching.

"You're up," she says, voice still rough.

"I think so," the woman answers. Quiet. Curious. Her voice is lovely--fragile, but musical, like an old recording salvaged from a broken player.

"Vitals are steady," C.lia says, checking the feed. "You'll need the circulator. You don't have gravity mods--your muscles would snap like noodles if we tried to make you stand. You're gonna feel like you're glued to the floor for a bit."

"I do," the woman whispers. "Like I'm... heavy inside. Like my blood weighs more."

"It does. You're on Kepler-452 Three. Welcome to hell."

The woman closes her eyes. Winces. "I don't know that name."

C.lia nods. "Probably not. You're not local. Your cryo-tech was off-planet. Earth-era signature. Something old, but functional. You were well cared for."

"I don't remember." The woman looks at her hands. Flexes them, slow, like they might remember before she does. "I don't even know... my name."

C.lia hesitates. Something about that hits. Like an ache she didn't know she was carrying.

"I guess that makes us both lost," she says. "You just more recently."

They sit like that for a while. Soft light. Wind wailing outside like some ancient beast dying and being born again.

The woman finally turns to her. "You saved me?"

C.lia nods.

"Why?"

C.lia shrugs. "You were beautiful. And breathing. And the only thing in that wreck that didn't feel like trash."

The woman smiles. It's small. Crooked. But real.

"I should thank you."

"You just did."

"We'll need to name her," Merida says quietly into C.lia's cochlear feed. "We can't keep calling her 'the woman.' That's cruel. Even I wouldn't flirt with someone nameless."

C.lia thinks.

Out loud, to both of them:

"How do you feel about Aura?"

The woman tilts her head. Lets the word turn over in her mouth like it's a candy she's never tasted.

"...It's warm," she says. "I like it."

"She likes it," Merida echoes. "Then that's what we'll call her. Until she remembers who she really is. If she wants to."