Chapter 12

A colossal meteorite drifted through the void, a mangled spaceship buried nose-deep in its craggy surface like a giant, broken lawn dart. Taro sat perched in the vice-commander’s seat of the Rockboy, the salvage craft currently bracing the wreck, his eyes glued to the glowing BISHOP interface. The Rockboy's cockpit sat right at the nose of the machine; through the domed canopy—which was actually high-grade reinforced resin, though it looked like glass—he could see Marl hunched over the controls in the pilot’s seat next to him.

"Standby... standby... NOW!!"

At Marl's signal, Taro's fingers flew across the Machine Control Functions. The thick cables tethered to the skeletal remains of the ship embedded in the rock went taut. Under the Rockboy’s raw mechanical strength, the metal frame began to groan, twisting and shrieking before finally snapping away in a jagged mess.

[MACHINE OUTPUT AND PHYSICAL SHIELD OUTPUT ARE STABLE. IT APPEARS SAFE TO INCREASE POWER BY AN ADDITIONAL 20%, MR. TEIRO.]

The lights on Koume’s interface, currently hard-linked into the Rockboy’s console, flickered in time with her synthesized voice. Taro began to hum a mindless tune, nudging the throttle forward. He coaxed the machine into a display of precision cable-towing that technically exceeded the manufacturer's "guaranteed safety limits" by a hilarious margin.

"…And stop! I’ll take it from here with the manipulator arms. Good work, you two. That’s a hell of a haul for a day’s work."

Taro let out a long, ragged breath and slumped back into his seat.

"Let’s get some distance, and fast. I don’t care how many shields we have; I’ve got a bad feeling about this."

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I’d usually leave the 'explosives and debris' part of the job to a professional, but… there! It’s loose."

Taro looked out the canopy. The derelict ship’s aft section was drifting slowly away from the meteorite, leaving its pulverized nose behind in the rock.

"Man, what’s the point of a meteorite-shredding ship if it just ends up face-planting into a rock? Was the pilot trying to go out in a blaze of glory or what? Total kamikaze move."

Marl let out a sharp laugh. "I have no idea what a 'kamikaze' is, but you’re not wrong. Still, who cares? The impact knocked the meteorite off its collision course, and more importantly, it just put food on our table. Salvagers thrive on other people’s bad luck."

[MISS MARL. IF I MAY BE SO BOLD, FINDING JOY IN THE MISFORTUNE OF OTHERS IS—MISS MARL, PLEASE ACCELERATE IMMEDIATELY. THE SHOCK OF DETACHMENT HAS REACTIVATED SEVERAL REMAINING EXPLOSIVE CHARGES.]

For one heartbeat, the cockpit was silent. Then, Marl shrieked, "RECALCULATE!"

"ON IT!" Taro barked back.

"Oh, come on! You’ve gotta be kidding me! I knew we shouldn't have taken this job!"

"Sh-sh-shut up! The payout was huge!"

Taro’s brain went into overdrive, using BISHOP to calculate the perfect escape vector based on the tension of the wires and the ship's current center of mass. He slammed the data into a Function Group and beamed it to Koume. Koume instantly crunched the numbers against the engine’s remaining output and tossed the result to Marl. Marl, drawing on years of "don't-die-today" experience, accounted for the Rockboy’s specific handling quirks and slammed the Steering Function into gear.

"GYAHH-HFF!?"

The sudden acceleration pinned Taro to his seat like a pancake. His Anti-Acceleration Suit constricted violently, squeezing his limbs to keep the blood from abandoning his brain in a cowardly retreat.

An instant later, a flash of light white-washed the universe, threatening to sear his retinas. A spherical shockwave of superheated particles slammed into them.

"De…bris… incineration…" Marl gasped, fighting the G-force.

[MISS MARL, PLEASE LEAVE THAT TO KOUME.]

The AI's voice was disturbingly calm. Eight Debris Incineration Beam turrets mounted on the Rockboy’s hull sputtered to life, dancing with robotic precision as they vaporized the incoming shards of meteorite before they could shred the ship.

"A big one! Coming… in… hot! SHIIIIIIIIIT!"

Taro screamed as he used BISHOP to override their trajectory, yanking the Rockboy into a sickening bank to avoid a house-sized fragment the lasers couldn't handle. The sheer centrifugal force almost blacked him out. Then, with a roar of silence, the massive chunks of rock streaked past their hull, missing them by inches.

"Ugh… guh… Are we… are we alive?"

The acceleration cut out. Taro felt the crushing pressure vanish, replaced by the dizzying sensation of blood finally rushing back into his skull.

"Yeah… barely," Marl panted. "But since we technically blew the meteorite to hell, I’m going to wring a massive bonus out of the Environmental Department."

"That’s… that’s great. Hey, Marl? I’m gonna be honest with you, since you’ll smell it anyway. I definitely peed a little."

"That’s fine… me too."

"Oh. Heh."

"Yeah. Heh-heh."

The two of them devolved into hysterical, post-trauma giggles.

[PERHAPS I SHOULD HAVE LEAKED SOME LUBRICATING OIL TO JOIN THE FESTIVITIES.]

The humans howled with laughter at Koume’s dry remark, kicking their legs and sprawling out in the cramped cockpit as the adrenaline faded.

"Oh man, my stomach hurts…" Marl eventually sighed, her tone turning uncharacteristically serious. "Hey. Seriously. Give up on that Earth nonsense. We’d make one hell of a team."

Taro crossed his arms, staring out at the void. "Maybe. But honestly? I don't even know what I'll find. Even if I get back, it probably won't be the Earth I remember."

"Then why bother?"

"I don't know," Taro said, his gaze drifting to the distant stars. "It’s a sense of duty, I guess. Hard to explain. It’s the place where my bones belong. Out here, I’m just an outsider. Just an Iceman."

"I see…" Marl murmured. She mimicked his posture, looking out at the galaxy. "We don’t really bury people on the station, so I don’t get the 'bones' thing. But tell me—what was Earth actually like?"

"What was it like? Well, for starters, there was the ocean. It covered seventy percent of the surface. Humans and animals were all squeezed together on the remaining thirty percent. At least back then, there was still plenty of nature left."

"Seventy percent water? That’s incredibly inefficient. Didn't they terraform it?"

"Terraforming? You mean like changing the whole planet’s climate? Nah. We didn't have that kind of tech. We just lived in the environment we were given and tried—poorly—not to wreck it. We called it being 'eco-friendly'."

Marl looked at him like he was speaking in riddles. Taro chuckled and kept going.

"Because of the atmosphere, you couldn't see the stars during the day. But you had the sky. You had sunrises and sunsets. There were deserts, jungles, tundras where the ground was frozen solid, and tropical spots where you could walk around naked. Where I lived, there were mountains and rivers just a short walk away."

"Huh. That sounds chaotic. A planet with a dozen different climates? And you just… went to rivers? Wasn't it dangerous?"

"Not if you weren't an idiot. There were rivers in the mountains where I used to play as a kid. I don't know about now, but back then, the water was so clean you could just scoop it up and drink it."

"You drank… river water? Raw? Without a filtration plant?" Marl’s eyes went wide. "What the hell? That’s not a planet; that’s a treasure vault!"

"A treasure vault? Oh, right. I forgot how expensive water is on the station. But that’s just the start. There were thousands, tens of thousands of types of plants everywhere. Real animals. Real meat. Not that synthetic stuff where you can't tell if you're eating a steak or a recycled boot."

Marl’s brow furrowed as she tried to process the sheer absurdity of it. "What about the houses? What were they made of?"

"Depended on the area. Mostly stone and wood. My house was a two-story wooden place."

"WOOD?! AS IN, THE TRUNKS OF ACTUAL TREES?!" Marl shrieked. "What are you, some kind of galactic emperor?! You drank raw mineral water, ate real plants, and lived in a mansion made of biological building materials? That’s ridiculous! No wonder you want to go back! That’s not a planet, it’s a damn paradise!"

"No, wait, it’s not like that was the only reason—"

Taro tried to de-escalate, but Marl was already muttering to herself, lost in a spiral of envy and disbelief.

"Do you really… do you really think it’s still out there?" she whispered.

"I don't 'think' it, Marl. It is out there. I don't know where, and I don't know what state it’s in, but it’s real. I’m the proof. I came from there."

Marl turned to the AI. "…Hey, Koume. Just for the sake of argument. What do you think?"

Koume’s lamps pulsed with a slow, thoughtful rhythm.

[YES, MISS MARL. WHILE I CANNOT DEFINITIVELY CONFIRM ITS COORDINATES, THE CREDIBILITY OF MR. TEIRO’S ACCOUNT IS STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT. HIS KNOWLEDGE AND COMMON SENSE ARE ENTIRELY CONSISTENT WITH PRE-IMPERIAL RECORDS. SUCH CONSISTENCY IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN THROUGH DELUSION OR DECEPTION. FURTHERMORE, WE POSSESS PHYSICAL EVIDENCE.]

Both humans blinked in surprise.

[FIRST, THERE IS THE LANGUAGE. MR. TEIRO SPEAKS FLUENTLY IN AN ANCIENT TONGUE CALLED 'JAPANESE.' CURRENTLY, ONLY A HANDFUL OF ELITE LINGUISTS EVEN RECOGNIZE ITS EXISTENCE. THE ODDS OF A RANDOM SALVAGER MASTERING IT ARE NEGLIGIBLE. AND SECONDLY—]

They held their breath.

[—HIS DNA INFORMATION. I TOOK THE LIBERTY OF ANALYZING MR. TEIRO’S GENETIC CODE. IT CONTAINS ALMOST EVERY MAJOR GENETIC MARKER PRESENT IN THE DIVERGENT BRANCHES OF MODERN IMPERIAL HUMANITY. FROM THE WINGED SUBSPECIES TO THE SEMI-HUMANS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATION?]

The silence in the cockpit was heavy with the weight of a world-shattering realization.

[THE 'HUMAN SINGLE-PLANET ORIGIN THEORY' MAY BE MORE THAN JUST A MYTH.]

On the space station, "nature" was a luxury that didn't exist.

Metal was everywhere. It was the only thing they had in abundance.